Your video never leaves your computer.
When you drop a video into encodevideos.com, the encoding happens in your browser using your computer’s CPU. Nothing is uploaded to our servers. We have no copy of your file, no temporary cache, no preview thumbnail, no debug log of what you encoded. We can’t see your video because it never travels to us.
That’s true for every encode, every preset, every audio extraction. If you want to verify it yourself, open your browser’s DevTools, switch to the Network tab, drop a video in, and watch — you won’t see a single upload request.
What never leaves your browser
- Your video file
- Its filename
- Its duration, resolution, codec, or any other metadata
- Any trim, rotation, or crop you apply
- The encoded output — it’s a download to your computer, not a round-trip through us
What we don’t collect — ever
- File contents
- Filenames
- Exact file sizes, exact durations, or exact pixel dimensions (we use coarse buckets and short-edge tiers when we count these — see below)
- IP addresses, outside a brief rate-limit window described below
- Anything that fingerprints a session or a person
- Anything sent to a third party — no Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Sentry, no ad networks, no embedded pixels
What we do collect (and what’s collected today)
We’re building a tool people use, and to keep it working well we want to know things like “how many encodes happened this week,” “are most encodes succeeding,” and “what kinds of inputs do people throw at it.” We collect those counts on our own server, with no third-party trackers in the loop.
As of 2026-04-29, our self-hosted analytics service is live — the events listed below are the only ones recorded.
The events we record are limited to:
- page_view — you opened a page on the site (the path only)
- file_loaded — a video was opened in the encoder, with these coarse details (and nothing else):
- a size bucket (under 50 MB / 50–500 MB / 500 MB–2 GB / over 2 GB)
- the file’s container format (MP4 / MOV / MKV / WebM / AVI / WMV / FLV / M4V / 3GP / MPEG / other) — detected from the file’s magic bytes, never from the filename
- a duration bucket (under 30 s / 30 s–2 min / 2–10 min / 10 min–1 hr / over 1 hr)
- a resolution tier based on the shorter edge (under 480 / 480p / 720p / 1080p / 1440p / 4K+) and an orientation flag (horizontal / vertical / square)
These help us troubleshoot — for example, if MOV files start failing more often than MP4, or if 4K sources are hitting out-of-memory more often, the aggregate counts let us notice and fix it. None of these fields identifies you or your file individually; they’re categorical bins, not exact values.
- encode_started — an encode began, with the chosen mode (compress or extract) + target (size, preset name, or audio format) + which edit-mode tools were on (trim / rotate / crop, each yes or no)
- encode_completed — an encode succeeded, with a coarse wall-clock bucket (how long the encode itself took, not the source video’s length: under 30 s / 30 s–2 min / 2–10 min / over 10 min)
- encode_failed — an encode failed, with the type (out of memory / corrupt input / unsupported format / generic)
- browser_tier — whether your browser is running our multithreaded or single-threaded encoder (so we know which path users are on)
Those events do not carry your filename, your exact file size, your exact duration, your IP address, a session ID, or anything else. There are no cookies set for analytics. Browsers that send a Do-Not-Track header are excluded entirely — no script runs, no event fires.
This list is the contract. It’s not “the kinds of things we might collect” — it’s all of it. If we ever want to add an event, this page gets updated first.
Rate-limiting and IPs
We don’t currently rate-limit. When we do, we’ll read your IP at the moment of the request, count requests within a one-hour window, and discard it immediately afterward. Your IP is never written to durable logs and never associated with anything else you do on the site.
localStorage
We may use your browser’s localStorage to remember small UI preferences (like which size button you used last). We never store file contents, filenames, or any video metadata in localStorage.
Questions
Email hello@encodevideos.com.