Video quietly became one of the main events on X. The timeline is full of clips, creators post interviews and podcasts natively, and long-form uploads now sit alongside quick hits. What you can post, though, depends heavily on whether you pay for X Premium. Here is how video on X works today.
The free tier: short and sharp
A standard free account can upload videos up to 2 minutes 20 seconds long, with a maximum file size of 512 MB. That cap is the same across web and the mobile apps, and it has shaped the platform's video culture: punchy clips, highlights, screen recordings, and teasers that point to longer work hosted elsewhere. Videos of 60 seconds or less automatically loop, which makes a clean ending worth planning — a loop that restarts awkwardly loses people fast.
Premium: the long-form lane
X Premium turns X into a genuinely long-form platform. On the web and iOS, Premium subscribers can upload videos up to four hours long, with files up to 16 GB. Resolution runs at 1080p for videos up to two hours; uploads between two and four hours are capped at 720p. That is enough room for full podcasts, interviews, webinars, event recordings, and even films, posted natively where the audience already is.
One quirk catches people out: the four-hour allowance does not apply in the Android app, where Premium uploads are capped at roughly 10 minutes. If a long video keeps failing from your phone, switch to a browser on desktop or an iPhone and it will go through.
Specs that keep uploads smooth
Whichever tier you are on, X is happiest with MP4 or MOV files using standard H.264 encoding, exported at 1080p or below. Add captions whenever you can: timeline video commonly autoplays without sound, and a viewer who cannot follow the first few seconds silently is a viewer who scrolls on. Shorter still wins attention most of the time — even with four hours available, clips well under a minute tend to earn the completions and reposts. Long-form works when people arrive on purpose, looking for that specific conversation or creator.
Watching video on X
Watching needs no subscription at all. Native videos play right in the timeline, and tapping through opens the full player, where longer uploads from Premium creators behave like any streaming video: pause, scrub, and settle in. That asymmetry — everyone can watch, subscribers can publish long — is deliberate. X wants the platform full of long-form content, and it wants the audience for it free.
So the decision is simple. If you only share moments, the free tier's two minutes and change is plenty. If you make anything longer — a show, a course, a weekly interview — Premium's upload limits are the difference between chopping your work into pieces and posting it whole.