Questions, answered.

Nowhere. The encoder runs in your browser and never reaches our servers: we don’t have a copy of your video or its metadata. The one exception is the optional support-upload flow, which only runs when you use it. You can verify the encoder behavior in your browser’s DevTools Network tab: drop a video, watch the network panel, and you won’t see a single upload request. Full story on the Privacy page.

Yes. No account, no card, no quota. Sponsored by EdProgress as a small free utility, see About for the longer story.

Yes, and meaningfully better than it used to be. The encoder works on iPhone Safari and Android Chrome for typical phone-camera clips and short screen recordings. Long videos and 4K sources are still smoother on a desktop because the browser has more memory to work with, but most reasonable mobile encodes succeed cleanly now.

MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, WebM, FLV, WMV, M4V, 3GP, MPEG, MTS, and most other common containers. Output is always MP4 (H.264 + AAC) for video, or MP3 or WAV for audio extraction.

4 GB. Files over 1 GB show a “this will take a while and may not work on low-memory devices” warning; encoding very large files in a browser tab is real work, and your computer’s RAM is the binding constraint, not our servers. On phones, the warning appears at 200 MB instead of 1 GB; mobile browsers have much tighter memory caps than desktops.

Output quality is a function of two things: the quality of your source video, and how much we have to compress it to hit your target size. A clean source shrunk a little still looks great. A heavily compressed source (a screen recording re-encoded twice, a phone video already trimmed in another app) shrunk hard will show artifacts that no encoder can rescue; you can’t squeeze detail back into a frame that lost it earlier in its life.

The other lever is duration. The same target size split across a longer video gives every second a smaller bitrate budget, so a 30-minute talk compressed to 25 MB will look much worse than a 5-minute clip compressed to the same size.

Workaround: split a long video into pieces. If you’re unhappy with the quality on a long source, use Edit Mode to trim the video into shorter chunks and encode each one separately. Two 25 MB halves of a one-hour talk look noticeably better than a single 25 MB encode of the whole hour, because each chunk gets the full bitrate budget for its own duration.

The encoder hits the size target you ask for, with a small safety margin (~5%) so a 25 MB target reliably lands under 25 MB. Two common reasons your output might still be larger than you wanted. First, the size you asked for is a target, not a hard cap; if the platform you’re sending to caps at exactly 10 MB, target 9 MB to leave room for container overhead, or use the platform preset, which knows the limit and bakes in margin. Second, the audio track is at a higher bitrate than the encoder defaults expect; if file size matters more than audio quality, trim the audio or extract it separately and re-attach a lower-bitrate version.

Most encoder problems come down to memory or browser limits on your device, which we can’t fix from our end. The exception is when something genuinely doesn’t work, a rare device, a new format, a codec we haven’t seen before. If you have a video like that and you’re willing to share it, we can use it to teach the encoder how to handle it, which helps everyone who tries to encode something similar after you. That’s what the support-upload is for. It’s the one path on the site that uploads a file, and it only runs when you choose to use it. Full story on the About page; retention details on the Privacy page.

Coarse, non-identifying counts: pages viewed, encodes started, encodes that succeeded or failed. Never filenames, file content, exact measurements, or anything personally identifying. Full event list on the Privacy page.

The encode stops and the partial output is discarded. The encoder runs entirely in the tab, so closing it loses the work in progress; the source file on your device is unaffected. Same if you navigate away or reload, there’s no resume.

Email hello [at] encodevideos.com.