Compress Video for Discord
Discord caps uploads at Free 20 MB, Nitro Basic 50 MB, Nitro 500 MB. VidSmaller compresses any video down to 19 MB so it fits on the first attempt — H.264 MP4 out, no watermark, nothing to install, no account needed to try it. Source files up to 500 MB without an account, 1.5 GB on a paid plan.
Discord raised the free upload limit from 10 MB to 20 MB in August 2026 — which means half the advice on the internet, and a good few of Discord’s own help pages, are now out of date. Here are the current numbers and what fits inside them.
Drag and drop a video file to start
Max file size: 500 MB free, up to 1.5 GB with a paid plan
Supported: mp4, webm, mov, mkv, avi, wmv and 33 formats in all
No watermark · files are processed in the cloud and auto-deleted
Discord file size limits, and what they really mean
Discord enforces the cap per file, not per message, and it follows your account rather than the server you are posting in. A Nitro subscriber posting in a free server still gets their 500 MB.
| Plan / upload method | Maximum file size |
|---|---|
| Free | 20 MB Raised from 10 MB in August 2026. Some Discord help pages still say 10 MB, and older mobile clients can still enforce the old cap — target 10 MB if the upload absolutely has to work. |
| Nitro Basic | 50 MB |
| Nitro | 500 MB |
Limits verified 2026-09-06. Sources: Discord — File Attachments FAQ · Discord — Account caps
What 19 MB actually buys you
Every other page tells you the limit and stops there. The limit is the easy half. Here is the half that decides whether your video is watchable: at a 19 MB target, this is exactly how much bitrate is left for each duration, and the largest resolution that bitrate can carry without falling apart.
| Video length | Bitrate left for video | Resolution it carries | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30s | 5,079 kbps | 1080p | Looks fine |
| 1 min | 2,475 kbps | 720p | Looks fine |
| 2 min | 1,174 kbps | 480p | Looks fine |
| 5 min | 393 kbps | 360p | Visibly rough |
| 10 min | 132 kbps | — | Visibly rough |
| 30 min | — | — | Not realistic |
Method: the bitrate column is arithmetic — 19 MB spread across the duration, minus 128 kbps for stereo audio and 2% for container overhead. It is a hard ceiling, not an estimate. The resolution and verdict columns are a recommendation, derived from published H.264 bitrate ladders and pulled down about a third, because re-encoding footage that has already been compressed once survives lower bitrates than encoding a clean master does. Deliberately conservative — we would rather under-promise than tell you a video will look fine when it will not.
19 MB across lengths and resolutions
The left column is what you have to spend at each length; the cells are what each resolution needs. Green means you clear it comfortably, amber means it is watchable but soft, grey means pick a smaller frame. Reading down a column tells you how long a clip can get before that resolution stops being worth it on Discord.
Source: Computed, not measured — no encoder was run to produce this figure · Method: 19 MB spread over the duration, minus 128 kbps audio and 2% container overhead. Thresholds from published H.264 bitrate ladders, reduced by about a third for re-encoded source.
How to compress a video for Discord
Drop your video in
MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WebM and 33 formats in all. Nothing to install — your browser uploads over a one-time link and the file never touches a third party.
The target is already 19 MB
We pre-set it below the hard ceiling on purpose: a two-pass encode lands within a couple of percent, and landing two percent over a hard limit means the upload fails. Change it if you want a different number.
Download and upload
Encoding runs on our servers, so you can close the tab. The result comes back with no watermark on any plan, in an MP4 that Discord will accept.
Discord compression FAQs
What is the Discord file size limit in 2026?
20 MB on a free account, 50 MB on Nitro Basic and 500 MB on Nitro. The free tier was 10 MB until August 2026, and before that 25 MB — which is why you will find all three numbers quoted confidently across the web. If your upload absolutely has to work, or you are posting from an older mobile client, target 10 MB and you are safe against every version of the cap.
How do I send a video over 20 MB on Discord without Nitro?
Compress it. A 20 MB target is genuinely comfortable for anything up to about two minutes at 720p, and most clips people want to post in Discord are shorter than that. For a longer recording, drop the resolution to 720p before you worry about the bitrate — that single change buys you more than any amount of tweaking.
Does Discord compress my video after I upload it?
No. Discord stores and serves the file you uploaded, unchanged. This is genuinely different from Instagram or WhatsApp, which re-encode everything. It means the quality you see in our preview is exactly the quality your friends see, and it means compressing carefully is worth it here in a way it is not on other platforms.
Why did my upload fail even though the file was under 20 MB?
Two usual causes. Older Discord mobile clients still enforce the previous 10 MB cap, so a 15 MB file can work on desktop and fail on a phone. And Discord counts the file as it is on disk — if your file manager is showing you MB as 1,000,000 bytes while Discord counts 1,048,576, a file that reads as 20.0 MB can be a hair over the real limit. Targeting 19 MB sidesteps both.
The reasoning behind these numbers
- Target 10 MB when the client is not yoursWhat the old cap holds, for uploads that have to work on a stale mobile client.
- Discord's limit is 20 MB now, not 10 MBWhen it changed, which help pages still say the old number, and the two reasons an upload fails under the cap.
- Which CRF to use for a gameplay clipScreen-captured and animated footage sit in a completely different place on the curve to camera footage.