Share videos by dropping them into Discord, like any other file
If you use Discord, you probably know that you can share photos, just by dragging them into a channel or private message. This actually works for any file. You can attach documents, music, and even videos.
As of about a year ago, some video formats will even be embedded, meaning that the video can be viewed from within Discord, without downloading the file and without opening a browser or external program.
While the upload limit for attachments is 8MB, Discord Nitro users enjoy a much roomier 50MB limit. This limit is very well suited for smaller videos, such as game clips generated by GeForce Experience or Plays.tv. That said, these tools are designed around creating high-quality video while adding minimum stress on the computer during a video game. As a result, the video files that these tools create are abnormally large for their length. For example, at the “Medium” quality preset, GeForce Experience creates a file 60-80MB in size for a 30 second 1080p clip.
While there are plenty of video transcode tools, like Handbrake, that can handle videos in a batch format, I wanted to have a way to click any relatively short (2 minutes or less) video, and have it instantly transcoded to a format that Discord will embed, in a size that meets the limitations. The idea is to be able upload videos to Discord without having to upload them to a third-party website such as YouTube, especially if the clip is only going to be viewed a few times.
What I wound up with was a Windows “shell command”, that transcodes any video, directly from Windows Explorer. It’s really easy to use! Just right click the video, and click “Transcode for Discord”. Wait roughly 10 seconds and drag the result into Discord.
This how-to will walk you through setting up a similar shell command, using the open source video encoding library ffmpeg.
