Handbrake.

Holy compression rates batman! I happened across handbrake after reading about it while looking into a problem regarding a loss of brightness when using MSI afterburner to record videos. I was stumped for about 30 seconds in regard how to use Handbrake but I figured it out and it's completely changed how I compress videos for the better. 

So how does handbrake work? Well I don't know the exact science magic that it uses to compress files down to such manageable sizes while retaining the quality that it does but it's amazing. Its very straightforward in operation, simply chose what video you want to compress, drag it into the client, and press the button the top left that says "encode". Depending on the size of the file it can sometimes take seconds to compress your file. If your video's file size is a bit hefty the encoding time may be a bit longer accordingly.

You may need to set up a directory for where you want your compressed video's to go. Handbrake may request you to perform this action if you don't already have a directory chosen. The compressed video can be less than a fifth of its original size in most cases, which is great if you work on multiple videos and need to upload them to youtube . The video below was originally around 760 MBs; after being compressed it was all the way down to 134 MB. This is without any loss in quality I might add.

If you want to give Handbrake a try you can download it here. If you're into video editing and need a free tool that does excellent compression I recommend you give this piece of software a try.