A practical guide to the four levers that actually matter when compressing video.
Raw video is enormous — a single second of uncompressed 1080p footage at 30fps can be over 100 MB. Modern video codecs like H.264 and VP9 use temporal compression (referencing earlier frames instead of storing every pixel) to bring that down by 99%. But phone recordings, screen recordings, and camera files still run large because they prioritize quality over file size by default.
CRF stands for Constant Rate Factor. It's the primary quality dial for H.264 video. The range is 0–51: lower numbers mean better quality and larger files, higher numbers mean smaller files and more compression artifacts.
| CRF | Use case | Typical size vs original |
|---|---|---|
| 18–22 | Archival, near-lossless | 60–80% |
| 23–27 | High quality | 40–60% |
| 28–32 | Good quality (GoVid default) | 30–50% |
| 33–40 | Acceptable, heavily compressed | 15–30% |
For most use cases — emailing, sharing, uploading — CRF 28 is a good default. You'd be hard-pressed to see a difference from the original at normal viewing sizes.
Halving the vertical resolution (e.g., 1080p → 720p) roughly halves the file size, sometimes more, because the codec has less data to encode per frame. If your video will only ever be watched on a phone screen, 720p is indistinguishable from 1080p in practice.
Dropping from 1080p to 480p can reduce file size by 70–80%, with visible quality loss on large screens.
Bitrate is the amount of data used per second of video (in kilobits per second, kbps). A higher bitrate means more detail, a lower bitrate means smaller files. For reference:
| Bitrate | Quality | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 8,000 kbps | High | 1080p professional content |
| 4,000 kbps | Good | 1080p streaming (YouTube) |
| 2,000 kbps | Standard | 720p web video |
| 1,000 kbps | Acceptable | 480p or smaller |
| 500 kbps | Compressed | Low-bandwidth sharing |
When used alongside CRF, the max bitrate acts as a ceiling — the encoder won't exceed it even during complex scenes. This lets you hit a target file size while still using quality-based encoding for simple scenes.
Audio typically accounts for 10–30% of a video file's size, depending on duration and quality. If your video is a screen recording, tutorial, or mute clip, stripping the audio track is the easiest free compression you can make. GoVid's "Remove audio" toggle does this in one click.
| Goal | Settings |
|---|---|
| Smallest possible file | CRF 36, 480p, max bitrate 1000k, remove audio |
| Good quality, half the size | CRF 28, 720p, auto bitrate |
| Share on messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram) | CRF 30, 720p, remove audio if silent |
| Email attachment (under 25 MB) | CRF 32, 480p, max bitrate 1000k |
| Upload to social media | CRF 26, original resolution, MP4 |