Linktree video background 50 MB limit: bitrate budget by length

A Linktree video background has no length limit, so the number that matters is 50 MB. Linktree's help page says a video background is limited to 50MB, plays automatically on a continuous loop with the sound muted, and accepts MP4, AVI, MOV and WebM. The page says there is no time limit, only a size limit. So the shorter the loop, the more bitrate each second can use: a 15-second loop can average 26.7 Mbps, and a 60-second loop 6.7 Mbps.

The rest of this post covers how to set a target, how to get a loop under the cap with Sume, and what the page does not say.

The budget

The arithmetic is 50 MB times 8, which is 400 megabits, divided by the length in seconds. It uses 1 MB as 8 megabits, and Linktree does not say whether MB is decimal or binary.

Read the table as a ceiling for the whole file, with the loop's audio included. The page says the sound is muted, so any audio in the file is wasted bytes, and a companion post covers dropping it in trim. For a planning number, take about 80 percent of the ceiling, because real encodes vary from second to second and the cap is a hard stop.

Why short loops win

No time limit sounds generous, but a long background is a bad fit. The video loops continuously behind your links, so a long clip means the loop point is rarely seen, while a larger file takes longer to load on a phone before the page looks finished. A short loop with a clean cut is a better design, and it also fits the size cap with room to spare.

The page gives a design guideline of its own, which is the aspect ratio. A separate post covers how to make both orientations from one clip, and this one stays with size.

Cut the loop, then check the size

Import the clip, then use Sume video trim to choose the range. A range of 8 to 15 seconds is normal for a looping background, and trim accepts a duration from 0.2 to 900 seconds. The output object, with width and height from 256 to 2160 and fps of 24, 25, 30 or 60, helps because a background does not need a large frame. There is no bitrate field, so you check the size afterward.

The function below takes a probe and reports the average bitrate and whether the file is under 50 MB. The sample numbers are placeholders.

LIMIT_BYTES = 50 * 1_000_000

def linktree_check(probe):
    size = probe.get("size_bytes")
    secs = probe.get("duration_seconds")
    if size is None or not secs:
        return "probe is missing size or duration"
    mbps = size * 8 / secs / 1_000_000
    status = "fits" if size <= LIMIT_BYTES else "too big"
    return "%s: %.2f MB at %.2f Mbps" % (status, size / 1_000_000, mbps)

print(linktree_check({"size_bytes": 31_000_000, "duration_seconds": 12}))
print(linktree_check({"size_bytes": 71_000_000, "duration_seconds": 30}))

When the file is over

If a loop is over, shorten it, lower the frame size, or lower the frame rate, and probe again. Each trim is a $0.02 job at the public rate and writes a new artifact, so you can keep every attempt and compare. Always cut from the original source and not from a previous result, since each exact trim is a re-encode.

A quick example. A 30-second clip of 71 MB is 18.9 Mbps on average, which is over the 13.33 Mbps ceiling for 30 seconds. Cutting it to 15 seconds gives roughly half the size, near 35 MB, which is under the cap. That estimate assumes the bitrate stays the same, so probe the real result.

Format

The page lists four containers. Sume trim in exact mode writes MP4, so that is the format you would upload. The page does not say how the site handles a clip that is longer than a few minutes or very large in pixels, so use the size cap as the only hard rule you can plan around.

Format is not a constraint, but the container still matters for compatibility. MP4 is the safest choice for a background that must start without a delay on any phone, and that is what exact trim writes, so there is no reason to look at the other three.