What Vidfryer does
Vidfryer is a free tool that turns any clip into a blocky, crunchy, deep-fried mess with garbled sound, the kind that looks like it was filmed on a flip phone and sent through a bad connection ten times.
You see and hear the result live while you change the settings, so you can stop exactly when it is bad enough. It all happens on your own device: your video is never uploaded.
How to use it
Good to know
No. Vidfryer runs inside your browser, on your own device. Your video is never sent to a server, so there is no waiting for an upload and nobody else can see it.
It is free, and Vidfryer never adds its own watermark to your video. The only watermarks are the joke ones you can switch on yourself.
Most MP4, WebM and MOV videos, and audio files such as MP3, WAV and M4A. If your browser can play the file, Vidfryer can usually open it.
Vidfryer works best in Chrome or Edge on a computer. Other browsers and phones can be missing some features. When something is not available, a notice at the top of the page tells you.
Resolution is how many pixels make up the picture. Frame rate is how many pictures are shown each second. Bitrate is how much data the video or sound is allowed to use each second. Lower any of them and the result gets blurrier, choppier or more garbled.
The normal export plays your clip through once and records it as it plays, so a 30 second clip takes about 30 seconds. Fast export skips the waiting and usually finishes a few times quicker. It works with MP4 and MOV videos, and switches to the normal export by itself for anything it cannot handle.
Match preview saves exactly what you see and hear, in a normal sized file. Tiny file makes the file itself small by saving it at your low bitrates. For the smallest files choose a WebM format, because MP4 cannot store sound below about 96 kbps.
A little. The Enhance presets sharpen the picture, lift the colours and even out the volume. They cannot invent detail that was never recorded, so a blurry clip gets crisper edges, not a true HD picture.
Yes. Open an audio file to crush or clean up just the sound, or pick one of the Audio only formats when exporting to save the sound of a video without the picture.