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Compress a Video on Mac

Make a video smaller on your Mac with no upload and no watermark. Choose a quality level or a target size, then convert MP4 to MP4.

Conversion Successful
100% local. Your file is processed in this tab and never uploaded.

Why convert on your Mac instead of online

The usual reason is a limit somewhere: Slack, email, a form that stops at 100 MB, a phone recording that came off the camera at four gigabytes. Compression sites will do it, slowly, after the upload finishes and usually with a watermark stamped in the corner of the free tier. Your Mac already has the hardware encoder those sites are renting out. This page just uses it.

Drop the clip in, keep MP4 as the output, and open the editor. Quality has four levels, or you can name a target size in megabytes and let the bitrate work backwards from it. Trimming helps more than any setting, since half the length is roughly half the file, and the estimate on the output card updates as you change things. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is watermarked.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I compress a video on a Mac for free?
Drop it above, leave the target on MP4, and lower the quality level in the editor. The first conversion runs without an account, and nothing is watermarked at any tier.
Can I hit an exact size, like 25 MB for email?
Yes. Set a target size in the Quality tab and the encoder works to that bitrate. Trim anything you do not need first, because length drives size more than quality does.
Does compressing lose quality?
Yes, that is the mechanism: a smaller file stores less detail. Fast motion and grain suffer first, so a screen recording survives heavy compression far better than a handheld night shot.
What is the size limit?
500 MB per file in the browser. The desktop app has no cap and is the right tool for 4K footage or a full memory card.
Does the video get uploaded?
No. WebCodecs decodes and re-encodes it inside the tab on your own machine, and the desktop app does the same through FFmpeg.

Compressing 4K, or a folder of clips?

The desktop app encodes natively with FFmpeg, has no size cap, and runs a whole folder in one pass without uploading a frame.

Get TeraConvert for MacmacOS on Apple Silicon. One-time Pro purchase, 14-day money-back guarantee.