Export settings are the technical choices you make when you save a finished video or audio file from your editing, recording, or design tool, such as Premiere Pro, Final Cut, Camtasia, Canva, or Zoom. Follow our recommended and required settings below to ensure your uploads go smoothly, process quickly, and play back in the highest possible quality.

After you upload a file to Wistia, it enters processing, where we encode a series of media assets, or derivatives.

Your media settings are the blueprint for this process. For video files, Wistia encodes these assets at various sizes and quality levels to ensure a great viewing experience across a wide range of devices and networks. For audio files, we’ll encode a single MP3 asset.

The original file you upload isn't delivered via the Wistia player; we only serve the optimized media assets we create.

For videos, we use a width-based (or height for vertical videos) encoding algorithm to determine the quality of assets that the video will receive. This means the wider or taller your original video is, the higher the quality output will be in Wistia.

Each asset we create must meet a width threshold to receive that quality level, and each quality level has a maximum possible bitrate.

Here is a full list of the assets we can create, and the maximum bit rate for each:

For example, if you want your video to play in 1080p quality, your original video must be at least 1920px wide. To reach 720p quality, your video must be at least 1280px wide. We also support HDR (High Dynamic Range) video derivatives. See our HDR Video Support guide for more information.

Wistia never upscales. The highest quality available for playback or download is limited by the resolution of the file you uploaded. If your original is 640x360, the best version Wistia can create is 360p. To get HD quality, re-export from your editing tool at 1920px wide (or larger) and replace the media.

Our system accepts many common file formats, but for the most consistent performance, we recommend exporting video files in MP4 format (suggested) with the H.264 codec (required). For audio-only files, we recommend exporting them in MP3 format.

For non-MP4 video uploads, we will re-encode the video to MP4 after you upload. Below is a list of file formats that Wistia accepts.

We currently require the H.264 codec for all video uploads, which is a common standard for web video. The codec compresses and decompresses the content, and it’s crucial for successful encoding and playback.

Uploading a media file with an unsupported codec may result in a media file that fails to process, or a media file that won’t play at all in certain browsers. If you need to transcode your video to H.264, we recommend using the free tool HandBrake.

We currently have limited support for the ProRes video codec; however, we will transcode it to H.264 on our end. You can upload videos encoded with ProRes; it just means slightly longer processing time because of the additional transcoding step.

Wistia’s player uses HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) to deliver the best possible version of your video at any given time. This means the Wistia player switches quality streams based on available internet speed by regularly checking the viewer’s connection.

Wistia’s adaptive streaming automatically chooses the highest-quality version of the video to serve your viewers without buffering. It also considers the size of the embedded video—if you embed a video at a small size like 640x360 wide, we won’t serve a 1920x1080 asset to that space because it’s an inefficient use of bandwidth. However, if the viewer enters fullscreen, we’ll scale up to the highest quality available if the connection can handle it.

If we detect a slower internet connection initially but the connection speed improves during playback, the player starts at a lower quality and then switches to a higher-quality stream based on that detection. The viewers don’t have to touch anything! Check out an example of what this looks like below:

Wistia supports file sizes of up to 26GB. One key way to manage file sizes is to export with a reasonable bit rate. For videos, we recommend going no higher than 15,000 kbps. Most uploaded videos can be kept in the 6,000–8,000 kbps range unless they include a lot of fine detail — think water, leaves, sand. For a 4k video, you'll want to be in the 12,000-15,000 kbps range.

If you have a media file under 2 hours long that is larger than 8GB, you likely missed a compression step and may want to re-export it at a lower bit rate.

Wistia encodes versions of your video with specific maximum bit rates, so a higher bit rate on the original file isn’t necessarily problematic . However, staying within the recommended range of 6,000–8,000 kbps mainly keeps your file size down and ensures a shorter upload time.

After upload, your media is encoded into multiple quality derivatives. Most videos process within a few minutes, but larger or longer files take longer. If a video stays stuck, shows only low-quality options, or fails to process, it's often an export-settings or file issue. Try re-exporting as MP4/H.264 and re-uploading — or reach out to our team with a link to the media, and we can retry the encode on our end.

If re-exporting or HandBrake doesn't fix it, contact support with the Wistia media link and the original file.

Play the original file all the way through on your computer. If it stops early or won't open, the file is likely corrupt or incomplete. Re-export it from the source tool, or re-download it, before uploading again.

Re-export as MP4/H.264 with AAC audio (44.1 kHz, stereo), or run the file through HandBrake, then replace the media.