2026-09-28
Bluesky raised its video limit to 10 minutes — its new 300MB cap means not every preset fits the full length
Bluesky spent about a year and a half raising its video-length cap in small steps — 60 seconds, then 3 minutes. On August 25, 2026, it skipped straight to 10 minutes. That's the headline most coverage led with. The number that actually decides whether a full-length clip gets posted, though, isn't the minutes — it's the 300MB file-size ceiling that shipped in the same announcement, and the two don't scale together.
Three jumps, all reported firsthand
Bluesky's video feature has a fully public paper trail, each step covered independently by TechCrunch as it happened. At launch, TechCrunch reported on September 11, 2024 that Bluesky would let users share "up to 60 seconds" of video per post, capped at "25 videos or 10GB of video per day," with email verification required first. TechCrunch reported again on March 10, 2025 that the length cap had grown to 3 minutes — six times the launch limit. And on August 26, 2026, TechCrunch and Engadget both reported the jump to 10 minutes, quoting Bluesky's own @bsky.app announcement: "You can now post videos up to 10 minutes long, and they'll upload 2–3x faster." The same announcement set the file-size ceiling at 300MB — a number neither of the earlier two jumps came with, since Bluesky's original 60-second and 3-minute limits were framed purely in terms of duration.
Why 300MB, not 10 minutes, is the number that actually bites
Do the arithmetic and 300MB over 10 minutes works out to an average of 30MB per minute — not a generous allowance once it meets an unedited phone recording. Apple's own support page on compressing a video on iPhone puts a default 1080p iPhone Camera recording at 70–105MB per minute. Run ten minutes of that untouched through Bluesky's new cap and the file lands at roughly 700MB to 1,050MB — two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times over the 300MB ceiling, even though it's well inside the new 10-minute length limit. The length cap tripled; the file it's meant to hold didn't get any smaller.
Where NearVid's own presets land against that ceiling
NearVid's Convert screen shows an "≈" size estimate before you commit to an encode, built from the same bitrate presets the actual export uses: WebM at 2Mbps/1Mbps/500kbps for High/Medium/Low, the browser-native MP4 path at 4Mbps/2Mbps/800kbps, both with roughly 128kbps of audio layered on top. Run a full 10-minute clip through each and the picture in the diagram above holds: MP4 at High lands at approximately 309.6MB — just over Bluesky's new 300MB cap, by about 3%. Every other preset clears it with room to spare: MP4 Medium and WebM High both land around 159.6MB, WebM Medium around 84.6MB, MP4 Low around 69.6MB, and WebM Low around 47.1MB. Treat every figure as a labeled estimate rather than a guarantee — the encoder spends bits on whatever's actually moving in the frame, so a talking-head recording tends to land under these numbers and a busy, high-motion clip can land over.
The workflow: trim to the real length first, then pick a preset with room
The 10-minute cap is still a hard, absolute cutoff regardless of encoding — no bitrate preset gets around it. NearVid's Trim performs a lossless stream copy, no re-encoding and no quality loss, so cutting a longer recording down to the actual 10 minutes (or less) worth posting is the first move regardless of file size. From there, if the trimmed clip is close to the full 10:00, MP4's High preset is the one preset in the lineup that can tip over Bluesky's 300MB ceiling — dropping to MP4 Medium or WebM High clears it at a size very close to what MP4 High would have produced anyway, since both land around the same 2Mbps-class bitrate. Check the size estimate before committing to the encode, and check the finished file's actual size before uploading — the estimate is a planning number, not Bluesky's own verdict. Every step happens in the browser tab, on-device; nothing uploads anywhere until the finished file is dropped into Bluesky's own composer.
How the new numbers compare to other platforms, per TechCrunch's own reporting
TechCrunch's August 26 coverage placed Bluesky's move in context: the 10-minute cap is "on par with TikTok's limit of 10-minute videos recorded directly with the app," while "Meta-owned rival Threads allows five-minute videos on its site," and "X lets free users upload 140-second videos" but "has made it easier for paying users to upload 3- to 4-hour videos with sizes up to 16GB." The same article ties the change to competitive pressure, noting Bluesky's active user base was down more than 25% year over year as of July 2026 — context for why a platform known for tight limits suddenly tripled one of them.
What this doesn't do
NearVid doesn't post to Bluesky directly, doesn't know Bluesky's exact server-side transcoding behavior, and has no "target exactly 300MB" button — the "≈" estimate is a planning figure to check against, not a promise, so it's worth confirming the finished file's real size before uploading. It also can't verify format acceptance beyond what NearVid itself exports (MP4 or WebM); anything about Bluesky's own encoder, daily upload quotas, or account-verification requirements lives entirely on Bluesky's side and isn't independently re-checked here.
The honest summary
Per TechCrunch's and Engadget's own reporting on Bluesky's August 25, 2026 announcement, the platform's video length cap jumped from 3 minutes to 10 minutes, upload speeds improved 2–3x, and a new 300MB file-size ceiling shipped alongside it. Do the math against that ceiling and a full-length, untouched 1080p phone recording — using Apple's own bitrate figures — comes in two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times over. A lossless trim down to the real length, followed by a size-estimated convert at Medium or WebM rather than MP4 High, gets a full 10-minute clip under that 300MB line entirely on-device.