Video compression on Mac, measured

QuickCompress's Smaller mode against a realistic 4K source, run on Apple Silicon with no upload step.

This is the same result shown on the QuickCompress homepage, with the full test context. The source is 15 seconds of 3840x2160 (4K) H.264 footage at roughly 80 Mbps, a bitrate comparable to real 4K30 camera footage. QuickCompress's Smaller mode compressed it locally on a MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Pro), using Apple's VideoToolbox hardware encoder.

Before151.2 MB
After33.2 MB
Time8.5s
78% smaller

The whole run, probing the source, planning a bitrate, and encoding, took 8.5 seconds. Nothing left the Mac at any point: the file was read from disk, encoded locally, and written back to disk.

Quality observation: Smaller mode targets a bitrate derived from the source's own resolution and frame rate, not a fixed compression ratio, so it aims to keep quality close to the original rather than always hitting the same percentage. A source already encoded efficiently for its resolution may see little size reduction: QuickCompress will tell you that upfront rather than compress it anyway.

Test methodology
Environment
MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Pro), macOS 26.5.2
QuickCompress
Pre-release build (v1.0.0, unreleased)
Encoder
Apple's VideoToolbox hardware encoder
Source
3840x2160 (4K), 15.0 seconds, 151.2 MB
Source codecs
H.264 video (~80.5 Mbps), AAC audio (~129 kbps)

Synthetic 4K test clip with real motion complexity, not a customer video. It runs the real production probing and planning code, then the exact bundled FFmpeg sidecar QuickCompress ships, so the result reflects the app itself, not a simulation of it. Every number on this page comes from a test you can run yourself:

cargo test --test benchmark -- --ignored --nocapture

Results vary by source video: motion, resolution, starting bitrate, and Mac model all affect how much a specific file shrinks and how long it takes. Treat this as one measured data point, not a universal claim.

Curious what happens when you need an exact file size instead of just "smaller"? See the 25 MB target size test.

Download for macOSSee how it works