LQC (Low Quality Clips)

Shrink less important iPhone videos. The app can be downloaded here.

If you have any suggestions or issues in with LQC, please reach out, I’d love to hear from you.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What feature or improvements are planned for the future?

  • Support for other file formats… I’ll have to see if I can get the same gains as I can from Apple’s frameworks on other file formats.

  • Allow users to customize compression settings (bitrate, fps, resolution)

The above is just what’s on my plate but I don’t have any set timeline for getting these done. If anything above is important to you, please drop me a quick message and let me know so I can prioritize it.

How do I use LQC?

If the intention is to replace large, high res videos with a much smaller, low res videos. You can achieve that by following these steps:

  1. Drag or open high res videos into LQC

  2. Any videos that have the “In Queue” status will be compressed, review the list and tap the “Run” button

  3. “In Queue” videos will be compressed to a temporary folder, tap “Output Folder” to open this folder and review the low res videos

  4. If you are happy with the size and quality, replace the original videos with the low res ones

How does LQC manipulate the video?

  • Bitrate is dropped to 1MB

  • FPS is dropped to 25

  • Resolution is dropped to where the smallest side, for example, portrait (width) or landscape (height), will be set to 480 and the long side will be adjusted appropriately to maintain original aspect ratio

My video looks terrible after using LQC…

LQC is great for compressing direct iPhone videos and you’ll often see over 80% storage savings with a resulting video that’s fairly decent for mobile viewing, this isn’t always the case, especially for videos downloaded from the web. Some of these videos are malfromed from other software or generated from poor quality sources.

We highly recommend to always preview the quality of resulting LQC videos before deleting the original.

Why are videos shown as “Errored” when I drag them into LQC?

LQC was made exclusively using Apple’s AVFoundation video framework. On the good side, this means that it works incredibly well for videos made with Apple devices. On the bad side, AVFoundation has almost zero support for file formats outside of MP4.

You can view exact error from AVFoundation by right-clicking the file and viewing Details.

Why are videos shown as “Skipped” when I drag them into LQC?

By default, LQC will “skip” videos are already fairly compressed. Compressing videos twice makes them incredibly poor quality and is not recommended.

You can see what specific aspect of the video LQC has a concern with by right-clicking the file and viewing Details.

If you want to try it anyways, you can right-click on the video and select “Add to Queue”. Be sure to preview the results before overwriting any original videos.

Video files can also be skipped if they’re below a certain size. By default this is 50MB but you can change this by going to the app’s settings.

The reason this setting exists is mainly to skip compressing files that aren’t even that large. If a video is only 16MB or something, why bother lower the quality when the disk space gain is so small?