Facebook video size

On 17 June 2025 Meta announced that all videos on Facebook would be shared as reels, and that reels on Facebook would no longer have any length or format restrictions. The Video tab was renamed the Reels tab, and Meta said the change would reach profiles and Pages gradually over the following months.

So the old split between a feed video and a reel has gone, and with it the question of which format to pick. What still matters is where people watch. A reel plays full screen on an upright phone, and the shape of that screen is 9:16. Meta’s Reels API documentation recommends 1080 × 1920 pixels, which makes it the target for anything filmed or edited for phones.

Other shapes still upload, because Meta lifted the format restrictions; they just cover less of the screen. A 16:9 landscape video shown across the full width of an upright 9:16 screen fills under a third of its height.

Tip: Worried that turning videos into reels makes them public? Meta says you keep the same audience settings and controls as before, so you still choose who sees each one.

The percentages assume the video is shown across the full width of a 9:16 screen. Many phones are taller and narrower than 9:16, which makes the landscape figure smaller still.

Landscape is still the right call for long recordings captured sideways. Cropping a slide presentation or a game screen to 9:16 would throw away most of what people came to see, so post it as it was filmed and accept that viewers holding the phone upright see a smaller picture.

Tip: Export one master at 1080 × 1920 and keep titles and faces inside its middle 1080 × 1350. Cropping it to 4:5 for a feed ad then removes only 285 pixels of background from the top and the bottom.

Facebook’s limits now depend on how a video arrives: posted by you, bought as an ad or published by a scheduling tool.

Sprout Social’s video guide, updated in May 2026, still gives 1 second to 240 minutes and 10 GB for feed video. Meta’s statement that reels have no length restrictions goes further, but a four-hour, 10 GB file is already a very large upload, so those figures make a sensible ceiling.

File size is length multiplied by bitrate. A 1080p export at 8 megabits per second takes about 60 MB a minute, so a 4 GB feed ad is full after a little over an hour. A full 241-minute ad has to average a little over 2 Mbps to fit.

Tip: If a scheduling tool turns down a long or landscape video, the Reels API is a likely reason: it documents 3 to 90 seconds and a 9:16 frame. Post those videos from Facebook itself.

Meta’s ads guide spells out the encoding it wants for feed video ads. The same settings describe a plain, widely supported file, so they work for ordinary posts as well.

• H.264 compression in an MP4 or MOV file, which every mainstream editing app can export.
• A fixed frame rate. Phones and screen recorders often save a variable one, so set the export to a constant 30 fps, or 24, 25 or 60 if that is what you filmed.
• Progressive scan rather than interlaced video. This mostly affects footage from older camcorders and broadcast sources.
• Square pixels. Some older cameras record non-square pixels, which look stretched if the editor doesn’t correct them.
• Stereo AAC audio at 128 kbps or more.
• At least 1,080 pixels on the short side. A vertical video only 720 pixels wide has to be enlarged to fill most phone screens, which softens it.

• Uploading a copy instead of the original. A clip saved from a messaging app or downloaded from another site has already been compressed once, and Facebook compresses it again.
• Letterboxing during the edit. Dropping a 1920 × 1080 clip onto a black 9:16 canvas bakes the bars into the file and shrinks the picture itself to about 1080 × 608 pixels.
• Upscaling a small source. Enlarging a 720p clip to 1080 × 1920 in the editor adds pixels but no detail.
• Burned-in subtitles at the very bottom of a vertical video, where your name and the caption sit over the reel.
• Exporting again and again while making small changes. Each pass through a lossy codec costs a little more detail, so export once from the project file.