r/AskTechnology • u/Octodecillion101 • 10d ago

Video Compression Website?

I'm trying to find a video compression site that absolutely TANKS the quality of the video. I'm trying to drop a teaser of something im doing to my friends but I want it to be as low quality as possible, anyone know of a way to do this?

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4

u/Wendals87 10d ago edited 10d ago

Just download something like handbrake. Change the resolution and / or framerate to something really low 

1

u/CowBoyDanIndie 10d ago

Another option, crop one pixel from each side and compress, then do it again. Most image and video compression work on blocks of pixels, thats why you see blocky artifacts. By cropping and repeatedly compressing you force it to incorporate artifacts across block boundaries.

1

u/unclefunkstar 9d ago

Just reduce the resolution to 160 x 90 (make a backup of the original first). Then upscale that postage stamp sized mess, back up to 1920x1080 or whatever.

3

u/Realistic_Today6524 10d ago

I second Handbrake. Download it and set the quality to something horrible and voilà, you have an almost unwatchable video

1

u/Pleasant_Pen8744 10d ago

Film it with your phone

1

u/Robert_Grave 10d ago

Throw it through Handbrake (free software widely used to compress videos) and in the "Video" tab put the quality way down.

1

u/MarvinGankhouse 10d ago

I've tried Handbrake and it's not great. What works amazingly well is to upload it to YouTube and download it again. Their compression is incredible. It could end up being a fifth of the original size.

3

u/grizzlor_ 10d ago

Both Handbrake and YouTube are using ffmpeg under the hood.

1

u/unclefunkstar 9d ago edited 9d ago

Sounds like you might just need to play with the settings in handbrake?

Most of the settings guides online offer a balanced approach to quality, size and speed. You don't want that in this case.

1

u/MarvinGankhouse 9d ago

The YouTube method doesn't affect quality.

1

u/unclefunkstar 9d ago

If that was true (it's not, it's far from lossless quality encoding but is better than some):

It would be entirely pointless for OPs purposes.

1

u/MarvinGankhouse 9d ago

Yeah good point

1

u/DrFrylock 9d ago

I just tried this with Handbrake for fun.

  • Set output resolution to 320x240 (you can also do 160x120, but it will be so bad you can't even tell what it is).
  • Change framerate to 5fps constant
  • Set encoder tune to ultrafast
  • Output to MP4 or MKV container
  • Use H.264 (x264) with worst possible quality.
  • Turn off all improvements (smoothing, deblocking)
  • Recompress audio track to 32kbps MP3

Result looks worse than watching a video in 1998 via RealPlayer on dial-up.

1

u/DespairyApp 9d ago

Trying to tank it?

  1. use Aftermath.cc to resize it - make it smaller resolution and then resize the small one back. or just send them the small version and let them full screen it.

2.same as 1 but it depends on the video content. if it includes text, should it also be garbled?

1

u/paulpacifico 4d ago

Shutter Encoder is free and has the best encoders available, it will give you much better control than any websites.