Launched this week
halfsize
Compress video to an exact size, locally
2 followers
Compress video to an exact size, locally
2 followers
halfsize compresses a video to an exact target size — 20 MB for Discord or WeChat, 16 MB for WhatsApp, 20–25 MB for email — then reports the measured VMAF and SSIM quality loss. It computes the bitrate budget, downscales when 720p beats a starved 1080p, and encodes in two passes. Runs fully locally on FFmpeg: no upload, no account, no quota, no watermark. Free, MIT licensed, with a local web UI, batch mode and JSON output.
Launch Team
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Hi Product Hunt 👋
I built halfsize after one too many "file must be under 20 MB" errors.
The annoying part was never making a video smaller — FFmpeg can do that. The annoying part was hitting the number on purpose: work out the bitrate budget, decide whether 720p looks better than 1080p at half the bitrate, then check whether the output actually fits. And every online compressor means uploading whatever is in the video to someone else's server.
So halfsize does the arithmetic and the verification, locally:
• --to 20mb, or --for discord / --for wechat / --for whatsapp
• measured VMAF + SSIM with a plain-language verdict
• batch mode, --json for scripts, --dry-run to see the plan first
• local web UI (npx halfsize --web), no upload
Just shipped 0.1.8: the local web UI can switch between the original and the compressed file, you can cancel a running encode, and a failed run no longer leaves a half-written output behind.
I would love feedback on two things: which upload limits you hit most often, and whether the quality verdicts match what you see. If it saves you time, a star on GitHub genuinely helps.