📹Compress Video for WhatsApp

WhatsApp transcodes every upload, usually down to 720p or less and a bitrate tuned for a quick preview. Anything you upload is compressed a second time by their servers. Compressing locally first does not stop that second pass, but it means the source is already at the resolution and bitrate you want, so you keep control over the final look instead of leaving it to their preset.

For most clips, 480p to 720p at a medium bitrate lands between 1 MB and 5 MB for a short video, which sends instantly and still looks acceptable on a phone screen. Social media clips are usually watched at a few hundred pixels wide, so the resolution drop is barely visible. The exact size is shown after each compression pass so you can iterate.

Yes. The encoder is WebAssembly, so it runs on the device rather than on a server. It takes roughly as long as the clip duration on a recent phone, and because nothing is uploaded there is no queue and no file-size limit — the only constraint is how long you are willing to wait.

The audio track is re-encoded along with the video at a proportionate bitrate, so what you hear matches what you see. For a long recording, trim the unnecessary parts first — a two-minute cut usually compresses far better than a twenty-minute file at the same quality setting.