Why you’d want to lower video quality on purpose
Six real situations: found-footage horror, a fake security clip, making an AI-generated shot feel filmed, a meme that needs to look reposted fifty times, a period-accurate school project, and a thumbnail that should read as 2005.
- AI video creators Texture too smooth, motion too even — a little damage reads as a real camera.
- Analog horror Scanlines and chroma drift do more than a low bitrate ever will.
- Meme authors One click, no watermark, no sign-up, no app install.
What each preset actually changes
Every preset publishes its exact resolution, frame rate and target bitrate — no vague "quality" slider doing the talking. Effects ride inside the preset; you only set how strong it is.
The table is the whole difference between them. CCTV keeps the 640×480 shape of a 2004 DVR; 144p keeps 36,864 pixels out of the 2,073,600 a 1080p frame starts with.
| Preset | Resolution | Frame rate | Target bitrate |
|---|---|---|---|
| CCTV / found footage | 640×480 | 12 fps | 900 kbps |
| VHS / analog horror | 854×480 | 20 fps | 1200 kbps |
| Early camcorder | 640×360 | 24 fps | 800 kbps |
| Deep fried | original | original | 2500 kbps |
| 144p / pixelated | 256×144 | 12 fps | 180 kbps |
Target bitrate, not a guarantee — the encoder overshoots by 4–14% in practice, which is why the size estimate is built on bitrate × 1.15.
What this tool is not
Not a compressor. Lowering video quality and compressing a video are two different goals: a compressor keeps your resolution and only lowers the bitrate, and it does that job better than we do.
No datamosh / glitch. That needs rewriting the bitstream, not encoder parameters.
No audio clipping or heavy noise stacking. Out of scope for this release — we say so rather than ship it badly.
Where the work happens
Encoding runs in this browser tab — the file is read and written on your own machine, and nothing is stored on our side. No account, no upload step, no queue.
Three honest limits: desktop Chrome and Edge only, files over 2 GB or longer than 30 minutes are stopped before they start, and anything above 1080p is scaled down first rather than failing halfway.
If a future version adds an optional server path for files this browser cannot handle, it will be opt-in and stated at the moment of upload — this page will never quietly start sending your file somewhere.