How to Compress Video on Android Fast

Video taken with a current-generation smartphone can be truly breathtaking—capturing fully stabilized, 4K video at 60 fps on a device that can fit in your shirt pocket still feels like science fiction. That is, until your friend asks, “can you send me that video?” and you find yourself dealing with a file large enough to choke a (metaphorical) horse. This is where compression comes in.

Thankfully, there are apps and websites that let Android users compress files quickly, easily, and without losing too much in terms of image quality, so you can share videos with anyone, anytime. Here’s how to do it.

How to quickly compress videos on Android

The raft of video compressors available for Android can be confusing. There are apps filled with popup ads and last-minute paid upgrades, or apps that just don’t work as well as others. In our testing, we found the Panda app to be the happy medium. The ads are not intrusive, the compression is fast and works well, and, most importantly, the interface is actually quite usable.

The app has good presets when it comes to compressing videos for emailing (under 25MB), and customizing them for social media uploads like Facebook.

The app workflow is simple. Give the app access to all media, and choose the videos you want to compress. Tap the “Next” button and choose the compression style. You can choose one of the presets, like Email or Facebook, or if you want to really compress the file, you can choose a custom resolution. Then, tap the “Compress” button, and your result will be saved automatically to your camera roll.

How to compress Android videos using a website

If the video is on your computer, or if you don’t want to download any apps, you can use a website to convert the video. Clideo is a trusted video conversion site that encrypts your video so that no one can access your private data.

The free plan lets you compress videos of up to 500MB. Click the “Upload File” button, choose the video, and let the website do the rest. Because the compression is happening on the server side, you’ll have to wait a couple of minutes for the resulting file. Once the compression is complete, click the “Download” button.