The current limits
The limit that applies is whichever is higher: your own account tier, or the boost level of the server you're posting in. A free account in a Level 3 server can post up to 100 MB.
Be careful with the free-tier number specifically. Discord has changed it repeatedly — 8 MB originally, then 25 MB, then back down to 10 MB in 2024 — and staged rollouts mean different accounts have seen different caps at the same time. Published guides currently disagree between 10, 20 and 25 MB, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Discord's own File Attachments FAQ is the only authoritative source; compressing to fit 10 MB clears every version of the limit, which is what the preset below targets.
- Free account — reported as 10 MB by most guides, though Discord's own documentation has also shown 20 MB and 25 MB during rollouts. Assume 10 MB and you will be safe on any tier.
- Nitro Basic — 50 MB.
- Nitro — 500 MB.
- Boosted servers — Level 2 raises the server's limit to 50 MB, Level 3 to 100 MB, for everyone posting in it.
Why your video is over the limit
Phone footage is the usual culprit. A minute of 4K video from a recent iPhone or Android handset lands somewhere between 300 and 500 MB, so even a fifteen-second clip can clear 10 MB comfortably. Screen recordings are worse per second at high resolutions, though they compress far better than camera footage because so much of the frame never changes.
The fix is almost always the same: drop the resolution and re-encode. Going from 4K to 720p removes about 89% of the pixels before any quality setting is touched, which is why it does more for file size than anything else you can adjust.
Getting under 10 MB without losing the clip
The Discord preset here targets the free-tier limit: H.264 in an MP4 container, capped at 720p, at a bitrate chosen to land under 10 MB for a typical short clip. MP4/H.264 matters as much as the size — it is the combination Discord previews inline on every platform, so the clip plays in the channel instead of arriving as a file people have to download.
For anything long enough that 10 MB means visible mush, trim first and compress second. Thirty seconds at a watchable bitrate beats two minutes at an unwatchable one.
Nothing is uploaded to compress it
The compression runs in your browser, using ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. We serve the code; your own machine does the work. There is no upload step, so there is no size cap on the input either — the only ceiling is your device's memory. Open your browser's Network tab while it runs and you will see nothing go out.
That matters more than convenience for anything you would rather not hand to a stranger's server on the way to a private channel.