What’s the Best Way to Make a Video Intentionally Extremely Low Quality?
Asked by
MellowCactus47
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?
Answers
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.
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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.
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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.
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SilverNoodle29: 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.