2026-09-12
Reddit’s video length limit isn’t what you think: 15 minutes for a post, 3 for a comment (and what Premium buys you)
Post a video to a subreddit and Reddit gives you up to 15 minutes — or 30 if you pay for Reddit Premium. Reply to that same post with a video of your own, and you get three minutes, full stop, no matter what you pay. Two completely different ceilings, on the same site, for what feels like the same action — documented in two separate Help Center articles that don't reference each other. If you've ever had a video reply rejected while a much longer post upload worked fine minutes earlier, this is why.
The number almost nobody hits directly: 15 minutes on a post
Reddit doesn't have a Help Center page titled "video post specs." The 15-minute limit for a free account only shows up as the baseline being improved on, in Reddit's own description of what Reddit Premium includes: per Reddit's Premium subscription page, Premium gives you "Video upload length of 30 minutes (up from 15 for non-premium users)." Read backwards, that's Reddit confirming a free account's post-video ceiling is 15 minutes, and a $2.99/month (at time of writing) subscription doubles it to 30 — the same page lists it alongside other Premium perks like an 80,000-character post limit (up from 40,000).
Reddit doesn't publish a matching file-size number for ordinary video posts the way it does for comments below — there's no "and it must be under X GB" line anywhere in these two articles. In practice, duration turns out to be the binding constraint anyway, which the math further down makes concrete.
The number that actually catches people off guard: 3 minutes on a comment
Separately, Reddit's own "How do I add video in comments?" article spells out a completely different, tighter set of rules for a video reply: "Select or record a video from your device, with a max length of 3 minutes," and "File size must be less than 1 GB (recommended: < 300 MB)." Reddit Premium is never mentioned in that article — the 3-minute ceiling applies to every account, free or paid, because a comment reply and a top-level post are handled as different upload paths entirely, not the same feature with a lower default. The same article's spec list rounds out the picture with numbers most people will never bump into on the other end: minimum length 2 seconds, minimum bitrate 1 KB/s, minimum dimensions 50x50 pixels — a floor low enough that almost anything you'd actually film clears it without thinking.
Two places video is switched off entirely, not just shortened
Both length limits assume video is allowed at all, and it isn't always. Reddit's own Community settings article states plainly that "Videos aren't allowed in private or mature (18+) communities" — a restriction set at the subreddit level, independent of your account or Premium status. Video replies have a second, separate off-switch: they're unavailable in Not-Safe-For-Work communities regardless of the post-level setting, and even where they're on, a moderator chooses who's allowed to use them — Mods only, Mods and approved users, or Anyone, the last being the default once a community turns the feature on at all.
Trim to the number that applies, then let the size take care of itself
Whichever ceiling you're aiming under, the first move is the same: cut to length before anything else, on your own device. NearVid's Trim is a lossless stream copy — no re-encode, no quality loss — so shortening a 40-minute screen recording down to the 12 minutes actually worth posting, or pulling a 3-minute reaction clip out of it for a comment reply, costs you nothing but the seconds the trim itself takes to run.
Size turns out to be the part you don't need to worry much about. Running the same labeled- approximation math NearVid's own export screen uses — preset bitrate plus roughly 128kbit/s of audio, multiplied by duration — a full 15 minutes at the Low WebM preset (500kbps video) comes to roughly 70MB, and even at the High preset (2Mbps) it's around 235MB. Reddit's Premium-doubled 30 minutes tops out near 470MB at High. A 3-minute comment clip, the tightest limit here, lands around 14MB at Low and 48MB at High — nowhere near Reddit's 1GB hard cap for comments, or even its 300MB-recommended one. Practically every ordinary clip you'd trim for Reddit clears the size bar comfortably; minutes, not megabytes, are the wall you'll actually hit. On Chromium-based browsers where WebCodecs H.264 encoding is available, NearVid's feature-detected Convert to MP4 card produces the same output at equivalent bitrates, worth reaching for since H.264 MP4 is the format the widest range of devices and apps handle without a second thought.
What this doesn't change
NearVid has no connection to Reddit and doesn't post anything anywhere — everything above happens in your own browser, and the finished file is yours to upload wherever you like, the same as any other download. Nothing here tells you whether a specific subreddit has turned video posts or video comments off, whether you have Reddit Premium, or what a moderator's approved-users list looks like — those are account- and community-level facts only Reddit's own interface can show you. What NearVid does is the part before any of that: get a clip to the length a given upload path actually allows, without guessing, and without sending the file anywhere just to find out it was three minutes too long.
The honest summary
Reddit enforces two unrelated video-length limits, not one: a post allows 15 minutes on a free account and 30 with Reddit Premium, per Reddit's own Premium subscription page, while a video reply in the comments is capped at 3 minutes and under 1GB (1 GB hard cap, 300MB recommended) for every account regardless of Premium, per Reddit's own comments-help article — and video is switched off entirely in private/mature communities for posts and in NSFW communities for comments, per Reddit's own community-settings article. A lossless trim to whichever number applies, run locally, clears every one of those ceilings with room to spare on file size in practically every case.