Video size and length limits for every platform
Every platform enforces two limits, a size cap and a length cap, and most of them enforce a third one they never tell you about: the quality they will re-compress your video down to once it arrives. Here is what each one actually allows.
Updated 2026-07-14
The limits, side by side
These are the publicly documented limits as of mid-2026. They drift, and they differ between a platform's app and its website more often than you would expect, so treat the table as the starting point rather than the last word.
| Platform | Max file size | Max length | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | 10 MB free, 500 MB with Nitro | No limit | The 10 MB free cap is the single most common reason people compress a video at all |
| 2 GB | No limit on a normal send | Anything much over 16 MB gets heavily re-compressed, so a 2 GB send arrives looking far worse than it left | |
| Gmail | 25 MB | No limit | Past 25 MB it silently becomes a Google Drive link instead of an attachment |
| X | 512 MB | 2 minutes 20 seconds | Premium accounts get considerably more length |
| 4 GB | 3 minutes for a standard Reel | Stories are cut into 60 second segments | |
| TikTok | 4 GB from the web, less in the app | 10 minutes for most accounts | Uploading from the browser gets you a higher ceiling than the app does |
| Telegram | 2 GB free, 4 GB with Premium | No limit | The most generous of the mainstream messengers by a wide margin |
The limit nobody publishes: re-compression
Fitting under the size cap is only half the problem. Every platform re-encodes what you send so that it can serve it cheaply, and that second encode is entirely out of your hands. It is why a video that looked clean on your phone can arrive on somebody else's phone looking soft and blocky, even though you never went near a compressor.
The practical consequence is counterintuitive: sending the largest file the platform will accept is often a mistake. A 300 MB upload to a service that is going to re-compress it to 8 MB anyway just means the platform's encoder makes every quality decision for you, and its encoder is tuned for its bandwidth bill rather than for how your video looks.
You get a better result by compressing deliberately first, to something near the size the platform was going to land on regardless. You control the resolution and the bitrate, the platform's encoder has less work to do and does less damage, and the upload takes a fraction of the time.
Size is bitrate multiplied by duration
If you remember one thing about video size, remember this. A video's size is very close to its bitrate multiplied by how long it runs. Everything else is detail.
That single equation tells you where every megabyte goes and gives you exactly three levers to pull. Make the video shorter, which costs nothing in quality because the frames you keep are untouched. Lower the bitrate, which costs quality directly. Or lower the resolution, which lets a smaller bitrate look good because there are fewer pixels for it to describe.
It also explains why changing the format almost never helps. Rewrapping an MKV as an MP4 moves the same streams into a different box and produces a file of almost exactly the same size, because the data was never in the container.
- A 3 minute clip at 20 Mbps is roughly 450 MB.
- The same 3 minutes at 2 Mbps is roughly 45 MB, and on a phone screen most people cannot tell the difference.
- Cutting 30 seconds of dead air off the front saves you a sixth of the file, at zero cost to quality.
What to do when you are over the limit
Work through these in order, because they are listed cheapest first. The early ones cost you nothing.
- Trim the dead ends. Almost every recording starts and finishes with seconds nobody needs, and removing them is free.
- Drop the audio if nobody is talking. An audio stream carries a steady bitrate for the entire duration whether it is silent or not.
- Lower the resolution before you lower the bitrate. A clean 720p beats a starved 1080p every time, and on a phone almost nobody notices the difference.
- Only then compress to a target size, and let the tool solve for the bitrate that fits rather than guessing at a quality slider.