56 MB to 3 MB: Shrinking Video Without Losing Quality, for Free

Sharing a product demo, a test recording or a site video with a partner often runs into the same wall: the file is too large for email. Re-encoding with a generic online compressor either barely reduces the size or visibly degrades the picture.

Streaming platforms solve this with per-scene encoding: they analyse every scene and allocate exactly as many bits as that scene needs — a static shot needs far fewer than fast motion. That pipeline normally lives in expensive cloud infrastructure. We wanted to see how much of it could run on a single laptop.

What VEO-Av1an Bridge does

VEO-Av1an Bridge is an open-source compression tool that connects two existing open-source projects and runs analysis, encoding and assembly with a single command.

• VEO (Video Encoding Optimizer) runs trial encodes scene by scene and finds, for each section, the lowest bitrate that still meets the target quality.
• Av1an is an encoding manager. It splits the video into chunks, encodes them in parallel on all CPU cores, applies per-scene quality settings (zones) from VEO’s analysis and joins the result into a single file.

No new codec is involved: the output uses standard AV1, H.264 or H.265. The gain comes entirely from distributing the bit budget scene by scene instead of applying one setting to the whole file.

Result

On a 56 MB test video, a well-known online compressor produced a 30.8 MB file. VEO-Av1an Bridge produced 3 MB. The whole run was done on a MacBook — by our estimate, around 90% of what large platforms achieve with dedicated encoding budgets.

Try it

The code and downloads are free under the MIT licence. Get the macOS and Windows packages from Tools › VEO-Av1an Bridge; the source is on GitHub: github.com/rizaocalir/VEO-Av1an. It has been tested successfully on Apple Silicon; if you try it on another platform, let us know whether it works and we will fix what we can.