But with the right settings, it'll look close enough that you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference.
Compressed video won't ever look quite as good or detailed as the uncompressed original. You'll need to experiment with compression settings and methods to figure out which balance of quality and file size works best for you. Throttle up your compression settings too high, and the machine gets sloppy, making the picture look blocky or less detailed (known as artifacting) or smushing a wide gradient of colors into an obvious, rainbow-y pixel smear (known as color banding.) The more compression you apply, the smaller your file, but the worse these problems get. By merely making a note of the pixels that stay the same, and recording only the pixels that change, video compression algorithms help fit the same video into a smaller amount of total data.īut computers, like humans, aren't perfect. Compression uses clever math to compare each frame to the next one, looking for areas of the picture that don't change.
Videos consist of frames, a series of still pictures played in quick succession to create the illusion of motion.
Happily, you can, with a little help from HandBrake – a free app that helps you compress video without sacrificing (much of) its quality.īefore we get into how you can use HandBrake, we'll quickly review how it works its magic, and which options might best help you shrink down your videos to your satisfaction. Whether you're ripping your Blu-ray collection to an external hard drive, or just trying to e-mail Grandma a high-quality video of your vacation, sooner or later you'll wish you could fit all those pixels into a smaller file. The encoding time depends on some variables like: the speed of your Mac, the duration of the video file, the codec you selected (MP4 or H.264), other programs your Mac is currently running and whether you decide to do a 2-pass encoding or not.In this age of HD and 4K, videos seem to keep getting bigger, but our hard drives and Internet bandwidth don't always follow suit. Last, click the "Start" button and stay back. Try to pick a location that has sufficient disk space to store the converted file. You can name your file and choose its destination using this box. Now you need to choose the destination location. You can modify 3 settings in the Destination section: codec, file destination and file format.
You could always go with the default settings, but if you'd like more control over the output, here's how to do it. The way your picture and sound quality will turn out in the resulting file depends on the settings you choose in this step.
If a dialog box doesn't open up, click on the icon that says Source and select the videos in you mac which you want to convert.
You can load videos such as 3GP, AVI, FLV, MKV, MOD, MOV, MP4, MPG, WMV you want to convert. Follow the directions on your screen and you'll be fine.
Once downloaded, depending on your computer's operating system, you'll be asked to install the program. If you already have Handbrake installed, please check to see if your version is out of date. Part 1: How to Convert Videos on Mac Using HandBrake Part 2: Recommend the Best Video Converter.Part 1: How to Convert Videos on Mac Using HandBrake.This tutorial focuses on how to use Handbrake to convert video on Mac so you can watch unaccepted video on your iPad or other devices. It is a free source Mac Video converter for you to convert DVD, convert video in 3GP, AVI, FLV etc. Not all videos you can transfer to your iPad? Wanna play DVD movies on your iPhone? Use Handbrake to help you.