Desktop software
Make Video Small
A Windows application that shrinks large video files by up to 90% entirely on your own machine — no uploads, no subscription, no account.
- Origin
- Client project, later open-sourced
- What it is
- Windows desktop application
- Status
- Version 2.0 shipped, free in beta
The brief
What they were actually up against.
Anyone working with video hits the same wall: the files are enormous, and every tool that fixes that wants you to upload them. That is slow, it costs a subscription, and for a lot of people it is simply not allowed — footage that contains customers, patients or unreleased work cannot go to someone else's server. The job was to get the compression without the upload.
What we built
The things that exist at the end.
- A desktop application that does everything on the user's own machine — nothing is uploaded, ever
- Next-generation compression that cuts file size dramatically while holding visual quality
- A side-by-side preview, so you can inspect the quality before committing to a long encode
- Batch processing — drop a whole folder in and walk away
- Automatic use of the graphics card, whichever brand it is, with a slower high-quality mode as the alternative
- Controls for how hard it works: quiet in the background, or every core while you sleep
- An image toolkit added in version two — enlarging, precise size targets, and stripping location data from photos
- Workflow automation: route the output, delete the heavy originals, shut the machine down when the queue finishes
Worth pointing at
The decisions that mattered.
Nothing leaves the machine
The entire point. Every competing tool is a cloud service, which rules them out for anyone handling confidential footage. Doing it locally turns a compliance problem into a non-issue, and it works on a plane.
Hit an exact file size
Upload limits are specific — twenty-five megabytes, not roughly. Instead of guessing at quality settings, it searches for the setting that lands just under the number you asked for, and gets there in a handful of passes.
Strip the data you did not know was there
Photos carry GPS coordinates, camera serials and timestamps by default. One click removes them. For anyone publishing images from a home or a client site, that matters more than the file size does.
Set it going and leave
The features that sound boring are the ones people actually use daily: point it at a folder, tell it to delete the originals once they're safely converted, and have it shut the machine down when it's done.
Where it is now
Live, and still running.
Version 2.0 is shipped and downloadable, and the source is public on GitHub. It began as client work, the client open-sourced it, and it remains ours to maintain and extend.
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