Video uploads: daily limits, length and format

You can upload 3 videos in any 24 hours with no membership. A membership raises that:

The limit is per account, not per project, and it counts every video you started uploading, not only the ones that finished. If you hold more than one active membership, the most generous one applies.

The 24 hours roll, they do not reset at midnight

There is no daily reset and no midnight. Each time you start an upload, UNI counts the videos you started in the previous 24 hours and compares that to your limit. A slot therefore frees up exactly 24 hours after the upload that used it, one at a time.

To work out when you can upload again, take the oldest upload still inside the window and add 24 hours. If you spent your whole allowance in one sitting on Tuesday at 9pm, your first slot returns on Wednesday at 9pm and the others follow in the order you uploaded them. Spread your uploads through the day and they free up spread through the day.

A video that fails still uses its slot

This is the part that catches people out. An upload holds its slot for the full 24 hours whether it succeeds or fails. A file that turns out to be too long, a file the encoder cannot read, a transcode that errors partway: all of them count, and retrying costs you another slot.

The one exception is an upload that never landed at all. If you close the tab or your connection drops mid-transfer, that attempt stops counting an hour later and the slot comes back.

So it is worth getting the file right the first time. A retry is not free.

What you see when you hit the limit

The upload stops and an error message appears reading "Upload limit reached. You can upload N videos per day", with your own number in place of N. It is specific, so if you get a generic "Failed to upload" instead, you have hit something else and Why does my upload keep failing? is the page for that.

The message says "per day", but the rule is the rolling 24 hours described above. It also does not tell you when your next slot frees, so work that out from your oldest upload.

MP4 only, up to 2 GB and 30 minutes

Three fixed limits apply to every account, membership or not.

1. MP4 only. Not MOV, not AVI, not WebM. The file picker in the builder only offers MP4, so a MOV will not even appear in the list. Convert it first.
2. 2 GB maximum per video.
3. 30 minutes maximum. For anything longer, raise a ticket with support and the team will publish it for you.

Check the length before you upload, not after

The builder measures your video's length in your browser before it transfers anything, so an over-long file is normally refused immediately, with nothing uploaded and no slot spent.

That check depends on your browser being able to read the file's metadata. When it cannot, the upload goes ahead and the length is only checked on the server, after the entire file has arrived. On a 2 GB file that means a long wait ending in a failure that also costs you a slot. Confirming the length yourself before you start is the only thing that reliably avoids it.

While it is processing

Uploading is only the first half. A video then transcodes before it can play, and it can sit in that state for a while or fail outright. What the video statuses mean, and what to do when one fails covers the rest.