Resize a video

Give a width in pixels and get the video back at that size, with the height following so nothing is distorted. Halving the width quarters the pixel count, which is usually a far larger saving than any quality setting will give you.

    • Where it runs

      A video is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.

    • No queue, no account

      It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.

    • No watermark

      What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.

    How it works

    1. Drop a video onto the box above, or press it to choose one.
    2. Type the width you want in pixels. 1280 is 720p, 1920 is 1080p.
    3. Press Resize. This one re-encodes, so give it a moment on a long clip.
    4. Download the smaller video.

    Resolution and file size are different problems

    Two complaints both get called "too big". A file that a form rejects at 100 MB is a bitrate problem; a video that stutters on an old laptop is a resolution problem. They have different fixes, and the fix for the second happens to be very good at the first as well.

    Going from 3840 pixels wide to 1920 removes three quarters of the pixels, and the file follows roughly in proportion. No quality slider gets near that, because the slider is deciding how carefully to store pixels you did not need to keep at all.

    Down, never up

    A request wider than the source is capped at the source. Enlarging a video produces a bigger file holding the same information, softened — the detail was never recorded, and no amount of interpolation invents it back.

    Some tools now offer machine-learning upscaling, which fabricates plausible detail rather than recovering real detail. That is occasionally useful and never faithful, and it is not what somebody trying to fit an upload limit is asking for.

    What it costs

    This is one of the operations that genuinely re-encodes: every frame is decoded, scaled and encoded again. On a three-minute clip that is a few seconds; on an hour of 4K it is a serious piece of work for a browser tab, and it is bounded by your machine rather than by us.

    The audio is carried across untouched. There is nothing to gain from re-encoding sound when the complaint was about the picture, and doing it anyway would cost a generation of quality for no reason.

    Resize a video: common questions

    Is my video uploaded?

    No. The scaling happens in your browser and the video never leaves your device. That is unusual for this operation — most online video resizers upload the file, process it on a server and give you a link, because doing it in a page used to be impossible.

    Can I make a video larger?

    No, and that is deliberate. A request wider than the source is capped at the source. Enlarging gives you a bigger file containing the same picture, blurred, because the detail was never captured in the first place.

    Will the video be stretched?

    No. You give a width and the height follows the original proportions. Setting both edges independently is something people do by accident far more often than on purpose, and it produces squashed faces that nobody notices until later.

    Should I resize or compress to fit an upload limit?

    Resize first. If the video is displayed far smaller than it is stored, dropping the resolution saves more than any quality setting and costs nothing you can see. Compressing a 4K file to fit a limit throws away quality you would have kept by scaling it instead.

    Why does this take so much longer than rotating?

    Because rotating writes one number into the file and this decodes and re-encodes every frame. They look like similar operations from outside and are nothing alike underneath, which is why one finishes in a second and the other takes proportional time.

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