I'm looking for a way to heavily degrade a video for a teaser I want to share with friends. I want the result to be extremely low quality—very blurry, blocky, and possibly hard to watch. Are there any tools or techniques that can reduce the resolution, frame rate, file size, and overall video quality that aggressively?
4 Answers
If HandBrake isn’t degrading it enough, uploading the video to a large video-hosting service and downloading the processed version can produce much stronger compression. The result may be dramatically smaller and visibly worse, depending on the original file and upload settings.
HandBrake is probably the easiest option. Lower the resolution and frame rate, then move the quality setting toward the worst end. You can also use a lower bitrate to make the compression artifacts much more obvious.
You can repeatedly compress the video instead of doing it just once. One trick is to crop a pixel or two from each side, export it, and repeat the process. Since video compression works in blocks, repeated exports can create really noticeable blockiness and other artifacts.
The simplest low-tech solution is to record the video again from another screen with a phone. It will lose sharpness, introduce noise, and usually look impressively awful without needing any editing software.
That works because the slight cropping changes how the compression blocks line up each time, so the artifacts build on one another.