Compress a video for Telegram
Compress a video for Telegram?
Telegram's FAQ gives 2 GB per file for free accounts and 4 GB with Premium. Most phone clips are far below that, so the reason to compress is usually transfer time or storage. This page measures what Balanced saves. Telegram's published figures are 2 GB for free accounts and 4 GB with Premium .
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Telegram's FAQ gives 2 GB per file for free accounts and 4 GB with Premium. Most phone clips are far below that, so the reason to compress is usually transfer time or storage. This page measures what Balanced saves.
Measured 18 October 2026
What fits under the cap
Telegram's published figures are 2 GB for free accounts and 4 GB with Premium. Telegram does not say whether it counts a GB as 1,000,000,000 or 1,073,741,824 bytes, so the table uses the smaller 2 × 1,000,000,000 and 4 × 1,000,000,000 and treats the result as a lower bound.
At 20 Mbps, a rate typical of a 4K phone recording, 2 GB holds about 13 minutes.
| Example | Total rate (video + audio) | Fits in 2 GB |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p streaming-grade | 5 Mbps | 0 h 53 min |
| 1080p phone recording | 10 Mbps | 0 h 26 min |
| 4K phone recording | 20 Mbps | 0 h 13 min |
| high-bitrate camera footage | 50 Mbps | 0 h 05 min |
| Example | Total rate (video + audio) | Fits in 4 GB (Premium) |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p streaming-grade | 5 Mbps | 1 h 46 min |
| 1080p phone recording | 10 Mbps | 0 h 53 min |
| 4K phone recording | 20 Mbps | 0 h 26 min |
| high-bitrate camera footage | 50 Mbps | 0 h 10 min |
What Balanced saves
Every measured number on this page comes from one run set on 2026-10-18: the live /tools/video-compressor/ page driven by headless Chrome/154.0.8037.92 on 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K (32 threads, 126 GB RAM, Linux 7.0.0-34-generic), software WebCodecs with no GPU. The sources are synthetic files made with ffmpeg (ffmpeg version 6.1.1-3ubuntu5): a test pattern, with temporal noise added where the label says noisy, plus a 48 kHz sine tone. They are not camera footage. Outputs were saved through the page's Save button and measured with ffprobe. The raw records are in the repository at docs/evidence/runs/2026-10-18-video-target-runs.json. A phone or a machine with a hardware encoder can land at different sizes, and that was not measured.
| Source clip | Setting | Output | Format, size | Average rate, whole file | Encode time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p30, 300 s, noisy synthetic source 163.1 MB | Balanced, original size | 68.9 MB | MP4 H.264/AAC, 1920×1080 | 1.93 Mbps | 34 s |
| 1080p30, 180 s, clean synthetic source 125.4 MB | Balanced, original size | 48.3 MB | MP4 H.264/AAC, 1920×1080 | 2.25 Mbps | 14 s |
| 1080p30, 60 s, noisy synthetic source 54.1 MB | Balanced, original size | 18.7 MB | MP4 H.264/AAC, 1920×1080 | 2.61 Mbps | 5 s |
| 1080×1920 vertical, 45 s, noisy synthetic source 40.1 MB | Balanced, original size | 16.1 MB | MP4 H.264/AAC, 1080×1920 | 3.00 Mbps | 4 s |
Reading the savings
Balanced cut the 300 second noisy 1080p clip from 163.1 MB to 68.9 MB, and the 180 second clean clip from 125.4 MB to 48.3 MB. Both source files were encoded at 6 to 8 Mbps, so these are reductions of 58% and 62%. A file that was already at 2 Mbps would not shrink like that.
Nothing here targets a size. For Telegram the useful question is how long the upload takes, and a smaller file helps on a slow connection. If the clip is under the cap and quality matters more, send the original.
Send as video or send as file
Telegram's send-as-file path keeps the original bytes, and with them the metadata. The registry on this site records that as Telegram consumer; send-as-file can keep metadata. The send-as-file metadata article goes through it. The compressed MP4 from this page is a new file. The MP4 files the compressor wrote still carry container tags (major_brand, minor_version, compatible_brands, creation_time). The creation_time value is the time of the encode, not of the original recording. For a file you plan to publish, run the output through Verify metadata removed and read Remove MP4 metadata.
There is also a Telegram video compressor page with the tool on it, and the limits table for the other apps.
FAQ
Do I need to compress a video for Telegram?
Only if the file is over the cap or the upload is slow. A 10 Mbps 1080p clip of about 27 minutes fits under 2 GB.
Does compressing remove location data?
Not measured here. The test sources had no GPS data. The MP4 outputs did carry creation_time and encoder tags, so check a real file with the Verify metadata removed tool before you send it.
Why doesn't the page set a megabyte target for Telegram?
The published cap is in gigabytes and no megabyte target is derived from it.
More tools
Video Compressor · Video size limits by platform · Video compression guide · Remove MP4 metadata · Verify metadata removed