I'm putting together a teaser to send to some friends and want the video to look as badly compressed as possible—very low resolution, blocky, and nearly unwatchable. Is there a website or tool that can reduce the quality that dramatically?
3 Answers
HandBrake is probably the easiest option. Lower the resolution and frame rate, then push the video quality setting way down until you get the deliberately terrible look you want.
You can also repeatedly compress the video. Crop a tiny amount from the edges, export it with heavy compression, and repeat the process. Re-encoding it several times tends to create much stronger blocky artifacts.
A simple way to get extreme degradation is to upload the video to a major video-hosting service and download the processed version again. The extra compression can reduce the file size dramatically and make the result look much worse than a normal export.
HandBrake and many online services use similar video-encoding technology, but the online reprocessing can still produce a noticeably more degraded result because the file gets encoded again.