Reel
Video converter and compressor
You can leave this page open — the conversion runs on the server, not in your browser.
Why compression here means something
Most free converters target a bitrate: they give every second of video the same number of bits whether it needs them or not. A static shot of a wall gets the same budget as a fast pan through a forest, which wastes bits on the first and starves the second.
This targets quality instead, using constant rate factor encoding. The encoder spends what each scene actually needs and the file size falls out of that. It is why "Balanced" typically halves a phone video with no visible difference, and why the result is not a fixed size — a complicated clip legitimately needs more room.
Picking a format
MP4 is the safe answer. H.264 plays on everything made in the last fifteen years, and the file is written with its index at the front so it can start playing before it has finished downloading.
WebM with VP9 is meaningfully smaller at the same quality and is right for video you are embedding on a page. It is a poor choice for sending to somebody, because plenty of desktop software still will not open it.
GIF is for short silent clips and nothing else. A GIF is roughly ten times the size of the equivalent MP4 — the format has no real compression and no sound. Where a GIF genuinely helps is somewhere that will not play video at all, which nowadays mostly means email.
Resolution is the bigger lever
Quality settings adjust how hard the encoder works. Resolution changes how much there is to encode. Halving the dimensions quarters the pixel count, and that dominates anything the quality slider can do.
A phone shoots at 1080p or 4K by default. If the video is destined for a web page in a 600-pixel column, converting to 720p removes data nobody could have seen and will often shrink the file more than every other setting combined.
What happens to your files
Conversion cannot happen in your browser and cannot finish inside a single request, so the file is uploaded and the work is queued. You get a link to poll rather than a connection held open.
Your upload is deleted as soon as conversion ends, whether it succeeded or failed. The result is held for one hour and then deleted, along with everything about the job. Both are enforced by a sweep that runs on a timer, not only when the tool is being used — which is the case that matters, because it is exactly when nobody is watching.
This tool uses the util.quest server. It cannot run in your browser — the work is either impossible there or too heavy for it. What you submit is sent to this server, used to produce the result, and not stored afterwards. Requests are rate limited, and nothing about them is logged beyond what is needed to enforce that.
Convert video to MP4 or WebM, shrink it without wrecking it, pull the audio out as MP3, or turn a short clip into a GIF. Conversion runs in the background so you are not holding a browser tab open, and both your upload and the result are deleted after an hour.
It's one of the free tools in the util.quest collection — nothing to install, and no account needed. Found a bug or want a feature? Reach out at [email protected].
