Manatee

How to compress a video for Discord on a Mac

· 6 min read

Discord caps uploads at 10 MB for accounts without a subscription as of this writing, with higher limits for paid tiers and boosted servers, so a phone clip or a game capture almost always needs shrinking. The recipe on a Mac: trim to the moment that matters, drop the resolution to 720p, and then let Manatee’s Shrink mode land the file just under the cap. Save it as MP4 so it plays inline without anyone downloading it.

Discord’s limits and what plays inline

The free limit is 10 MB per file as of this writing; the paid tiers raise it substantially, and the figures change, so Slack, Teams and Discord file size limits tracks them. Server boosts raise the limit for everyone in that server too, which is why a clip that posts fine in one server bounces in another.

Inline playback is a separate question from the cap. Discord embeds a player for MP4 and WebM, and generally for MOV; what trips people up is the codec inside. An iPhone recording in HEVC (the default “High Efficiency” setting) can upload successfully and then show as a broken or download-only attachment for friends on Windows or Android. An MP4 is the safe target. H.264 vs HEVC explains which devices can open what.

Trim to the moment

Ten megabytes is not much room, and length is the dial that costs nothing in quality.

  1. Open the clip in QuickTime Player.
  2. Choose Edit, Trim. Drag the yellow handles so the clip starts a second before the thing happens and ends a second after.
  3. Click Trim, then File, Save.

A 45-second capture cut to 8 seconds can usually survive at full quality. A two-minute clip cannot fit in 10 MB without looking like a watercolor, and no tool changes that.

Resolution and frame rate

Game captures from a Mac are typically 1440p or higher at 60 frames per second, and phone clips are 1080p or 4K at 30 or 60. Discord’s player on a phone screen is a few hundred pixels wide; on a desktop it is a window, not a cinema. Dropping to 720p cuts the data needed by more than half compared with 1080p, and going from 60 fps to 30 cuts it roughly in half again. For a clip of gameplay where the motion is the point, keeping 60 fps at 720p looks better than 30 fps at 1080p. For a clip of something happening on screen, 1080p at 30 reads better. Bitrate, resolution and frame rate goes through the tradeoffs properly.

If the capture came from the Mac’s own screen recorder, it is worth changing the recorder’s settings before the next session so there is less to shrink afterward.

Export with QuickTime Player

For short clips this can be enough.

  1. With the trimmed clip open, choose File, Export As, then 720p (or 480p for something very long).
  2. Save it, then select the file in Finder and press Command-I to see the size.
  3. Under 10 MB: post it. Over: go to the next section, starting from the trimmed file rather than from this export.

QuickTime writes a .mov. It generally plays inline on Discord, but converting to MP4 in the next step removes the doubt.

Shrink to a named size with Manatee

Shrink mode takes a size and finds the quality that fits, which beats guessing with presets.

  1. Open Manatee. It is free with every feature for 24 hours, no account or card, then $9 once.
  2. Drag the trimmed clip onto the menu bar icon or into the window’s drop zone.
  3. Choose Shrink and enter 9 (for a 10 MB cap; leave margin, because Discord measures the file its own way and a clip at 9.9 MB may still bounce).
  4. The shrunk copy is written beside the original, which is never modified.
  5. Drop the result into Discord and check that it plays in the channel.

If the source was a MOV, MKV, or WebM, or an iPhone HEVC recording, run Convert to MP4 in Manatee as well so it plays for everyone. Do not run Shrink on an already-shrunk file; go back to the trimmed original each time, since compressing a video twice compounds the damage.

Manatee is not a video editor. It does not trim, crop, overlay text, or capture gameplay; it changes the size and the format of a file you already have.

If it still looks muddy

When 9 MB is not enough for the clip you have, the options are the honest ones.

  • Cut more. Every second you drop gives the remaining seconds more data.
  • Go to 480p. For a phone-sized player it is less of a loss than it sounds.
  • Turn it into a GIF only if it is under about five seconds and has no sound; GIFs are much larger per second than video.
  • Post it to a video host and paste the link. Discord embeds the player from most of them, and the cap does not apply.

Questions

Why does my video upload to Discord but not play for some people?

Almost always the codec. An HEVC file from an iPhone plays for other iPhone users and recent Macs but not for everyone. Convert to MP4 and re-post.

What resolution does Discord show videos at?

Whatever you upload, scaled to fit the message window or the phone screen. Anything above 1080p is wasted under the cap; 720p is the sweet spot for a 10 MB file.

Can I compress a video for Discord on my iPhone instead?

Manatee is Mac only. Trim on the phone, AirDrop the clip to the Mac, shrink there, and AirDrop it back or post from the Discord desktop app.

Does Discord compress videos itself?

No. It stores and serves what you upload, which is why the cap is strict and why you have to do the shrinking yourself.