is 7zip good for compressing videos on mac

Is 7Zip Good For Compressing Videos On Free App That

Is 7Zip Good For Compressing Videos On Free App That

Happily, you can, with a little help from HandBrake a free app that helps you compress video without sacrificing (much of) its quality.

Compression uses clever math to compare each frame to the next one, looking for areas of the picture that dont change.

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.

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.

Compressed video wont ever look quite as good or detailed as the uncompressed original.

But with the right settings, itll look close enough that youll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

The first two arent worth considering with the latter two available.

And both held up no matter what I threw at them, from animated movies to black-and-white classics to films with lots of fast action and bright colors.

Theyre generally considered comparable in quality to H.264 and HEVC, respectively.

Again, the trade-off here boils down fairly simply: a longer wait for smaller files, or a much shorter wait for somewhat larger ones.

Then it adjusts how much compression it applies scene-by-scene to hit that quality mark.

This results in smaller final file sizes - but while it looked pretty good to my untrained eye, the resulting picture quality might not match that of your second option.

Basically, the higher the bitrate, the better your video looks, and the bigger the resulting file is.

Thus, if you want the smallest possible file size with HEVC, youll have to wait a looooong time, unless youre rocking one of Apples tricked-out, professional-grade, cost-of-a-small-car high-end Macs.

Remember, those speeds will vary based on your own hardware I used a 2017 5K iMac but the numbers below can give you a rough idea of what to expect.

But on average, my tests found that constant-quality HEVC ran about 35 smaller than equivalent H.264.).

But before you open the downloaded file, make sure you validate its checksum.

HandBrakes creators added this security measure after hackers broke into their servers in 2017, briefly replacing the real app with a bogus version that installed malware on unfortunate users computers.

You can also do this via the Open Source button in the apps upper left corner, or by simply dragging a video file onto the app.

But iTunes and QuickTime wont play MKVs, though media servers like Plex and free players like VLC will.

HandBrake offers unusually helpful tooltips when you roll over each item in its interface, so Ill encourage you to explore on your own, and just cover the basics here.

Youll probably use its General (to create MP4 videos) and Matroska (to create MKVs) settings most often.

Is 7Zip Good For Compressing Videos On Mac