Discord's free upload limit is 20MB (it was 10MB until August 2026). A two-minute screen recording or a phone clip is often bigger than that, so the upload fails and you start hunting for an "online compressor."
Most of those sites upload the file to a server. If the clip is a client call, a game session, or anything you do not want sitting on someone else's disk, that is the wrong tool.
You can compress a video for Discord in the browser instead. The file never leaves the tab.
1. Open the compressor
Go to videocompress.dev. There is no account and no watermark. Pick the video (MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, and other formats your browser can decode). It stays on your machine.
2. Set the target to 20MB
Choose Target size and enter 20. That is the Discord free-tier cap (up from 10MB in August 2026). The Discord MP4 compressor does the same job with the target already set near 19MB so you slip under the cap. If the clip is a screen recording with a lot of text, keep the original resolution first. Dropping to 720p only helps when the encode is starving for bits. On a test screen recording I ran back when the cap was 10MB (10.70MB → target 10MB) the output was 5.61MB at the same 1280×720, and the on-page text stayed readable. With 20MB you get twice the budget, so it only gets easier.
3. Download the MP4 and send it
Output is MP4 (H.264 + AAC), which Discord plays without a fight. Upload that file in the channel.
If it is still too big: set resolution to 720p and run it again. If your phone runs out of memory on a long 4K clip, use a desktop — there is no server quota, but there is a device-memory quota.
For why a target works (and when it goes soft), see the video compression guide.
What this does not do
It does not upload the video. It does not promise a specific look at 20MB on every source. A 45-second noisy 1080p clip will look softer than a talking-head clip of the same size. Judge the preview before you send.
Need a hard cap on a file that is too large for the browser tab? Compress the video to an exact file size in the cloud instead.
The tool picks a bitrate from the duration and leaves a safety margin, so the download usually lands under your target rather than slightly over.
Related on Medium: getting a clip under the 25MB email limit and compressing a video without uploading it.
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