Compress a video for email
Pre-set for a 25 MB attachment: 720p at a quality that still looks fine.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
The limits
Gmail caps attachments at 25 MB, Outlook at 20 MB, and many corporate mail servers are stricter than either. Aim under 20 MB and you will clear almost all of them.
Bear in mind that mail encoding inflates attachments by roughly a third in transit, which is why a file that looks like it fits sometimes bounces. Leaving headroom is worth it.
The inflation, specifically
Attachments are not sent as raw bytes. Mail is a text protocol, so binary files are encoded in base64, which represents every three bytes as four characters. That is a fixed 33% overhead before anything else, and it is applied to the file as it leaves you. A 24 MB video becomes roughly 32 MB in transit and is refused by a server advertising a 25 MB limit, which is the single most common reason a send fails after a long upload. Aim under 18 MB and the arithmetic stops being your problem.
What these settings are doing
The page arrives with three things already chosen: 720p, quality 28, and 96 kbps audio. Height is the strongest lever, since going from 1080p to 720p removes more than half the pixels and therefore most of the work the encoder has to do. Quality 28 is a step past the visually transparent range and looks entirely acceptable in a mail client window, which is not a critical viewing environment. 96 kbps audio is transparent for speech and unremarkable for anything else at this size.
You can change all three. The result panel reports the finished size and the reduction, so the practical loop is to run it, look at the number, and adjust one setting rather than guessing at a combination.
When to stop compressing and send a link instead
There is a length past which this stops being worth doing. Fitting two or three minutes into 20 MB is comfortable. Ten minutes means roughly 0.25 megabits per second for the picture, which looks like a smeared mess regardless of what you set. Twenty minutes is not a compression problem at all.
At that point the honest options are to trim the video down to the part that matters with cut or trim, or to put the file somewhere and send a link. A recipient who receives a watchable three minute clip is better served than one who receives twenty minutes of blur. If the file is going to a chat platform rather than to mail, the Discord preset targets a tighter 10 MB.
Common questions
How long a video fits in 25 MB?
Around two to three minutes at these settings for ordinary footage.
Is there a better way to send a long video?
Yes, a file link. Compressing a 20 minute video to 25 MB will not produce anything worth watching.