if you have a chance, compare the vhs and dvd of the same material, and you will see the difference. the average vhs recorder, especially when being several decades old, is by no means able to get any proper quality out of a tape, which is not such a great medium to begin with. The key for vhs is the process of digitalizing. i myself encode bluray movies to 1/20 of the original size with good image quality using handbrake. they usually are very lowly compressed, which leaves converter programs a big wiggle room. In general it is true, that handbrake (utilizing the new h265 codec) can reduce the filesize of a video dramatically without significant quality loss, but that goes only for high quality input material, such as dvd or blurays. improving the quality of such a video on the pc, with whatever program or codec, is a nightmare. Vhs, when digitalized, offer a very poor video quality as well as a generally very grainy, noisy picture, not to mention artifacts, deinterlacing etc. mp4 video with 1280×720 resolution at 30 frames per second and AAC sound (file size ca.I have been working with handbrake and h265 as well as with digitalizing vhs extensively, and my experience is this:

use Handbrake (FREE from ) and choose ‘Presets’ > ‘Gmail Large 3 minutes 720p30’, then click ‘Start’ to convert.

mp4 video with 1280×720 resolution at 30 frames per second and AAC sound (file size ca.

use Smart Converter (FREE from Mac AppStore) and choose ‘for iPhone or iPod’, then click ‘Convert’ to convert.

you can do this in QuickTime Player (included in macOS for FREE).

make sure you trim down the length of the video to a clip that only includes the most relevant part of the video.

However, if you already have the video on your Mac and you want to compress it before you send it using WhatsApp Desktop (for macOS), do this : If you have shot the video on your iPhone you can send it right away, and iOS will do the compression for you. How can I compress it for easy viewing on Whatsapp ? I would like to send a small piece of a video I just shot at a birthday party to a group of friends on WhatsApp, but it’s too big to upload.

Handbrake for compressing video