Fix pixelated video online. See it before you pay.

Pixelated video is one of the most common complaints in video, and it has one root cause: not enough data per frame. A video file is a stream of heavily compressed pictures. When the bitrate is generous, the compression is invisible. When it is not, the encoder groups pixels into blocks and approximates each block, and what you see is a mosaic of squares, smeared edges and mushy texture.

Why your video is pixelated

The cause decides what is fixable. Low bitrate is the most common: a screen recording, a WhatsApp forward or an export with the wrong settings. Repeated compression is next, where a clip is saved, uploaded, downloaded and re-uploaded, losing a little more each round. Upscaling makes a small video look blocky on a big screen because each pixel is stretched. Digital zoom crops into a sensor that never recorded the detail. And occasionally the file is damaged, so frames decode wrongly. If you are not sure which applies, our guide on why videos get pixelated walks through the tell-tale signs.

Why sharpening and upscaling filters fall short

The classic fixes are a sharpen filter, a denoiser and a bicubic upscale. They help a little, and every video editor has them. The trouble is that they can only work with the pixels that exist. A sharpen filter makes block edges crisper, which often makes pixelation look worse. A denoiser smooths blocks into a plastic blur. An upscaler enlarges the same damaged pixels. You end up with a bigger version of the same problem. If you want to try that route yourself, our FFmpeg guide shows the exact filters and their limits.

What AI video restoration does differently

A restoration model such as SeedVR2 is trained on huge numbers of clean and degraded video pairs. It has learned what eyelashes, brick walls, grass and printed text look like, and what compression does to them. Given your damaged frames, it predicts the clean version, using neighbouring frames so the result stays stable instead of shimmering. That is how a face goes from a smear to something with defined eyes, and how a code editor goes from fuzz to readable text. You can see it in the slider at the top of this page: those frames are unedited model output.

Think of it as an informed reconstruction, not a magic zoom. It is very good at plausible detail, and you should always check the preview.

What it can and cannot do

Restoration works best on footage that is blocky, soft or noisy but still contains the shapes of things: a phone video that was messaged around, a screen recording, a clip from an old camera, a meeting recording. It works less well when the source is a handful of pixels, extremely dark, or shot through heavy motion blur. Faces in particular can look slightly different from reality, because the model is filling in what it thinks should be there. For anything where accuracy matters, such as evidence or identification, you should not rely on AI-restored detail.

It also will not give you 4K. We cap output at 1080p because the extra step to 4K adds file size rather than real detail. If you want to understand where that line sits, read 720p vs 1080p and our guide to upscaling video to 1080p.

How to get the best result from your upload

• Upload the original file, not a screen capture of it or a version that has been through a chat app, if you still have it.
• Do not pre-sharpen or filter the clip. Restoration works best on the raw damage.
• Keep clips under two minutes if you can. That is the range where the AI restoration runs on the whole video; longer files use our standard cleanup pipeline.
• Check faces and text in the preview. They are the hardest things to restore and the first things you will notice.
• Pick the plan that matches your project. One clip is a single video; a small project is cheaper as a 3-pack; regular use suits the monthly plan.

Where this fits among your options

You have three realistic choices. You can re-export from the original project with better settings, which is always best if you still have the source. You can use desktop restoration software, which is powerful but needs a capable GPU, a licence and patience. Or you can use an online tool like this one, which needs a browser and a couple of minutes. We built this for the third case: people who have one or two clips they care about and no wish to learn a video suite. Our guides for iPhone, Android, Premiere Pro and CapCut cover how to avoid the problem in the first place.

When you are ready, upload a clip at the top of the page. The preview takes about a minute, costs nothing, and tells you whether the full restoration is worth it.