Guides
TikTok video quality, measured
Most advice about TikTok quality is repeated rather than tested. Everything here comes from reading real files — what TikTok actually serves, byte for byte — and where we are unsure, we say so.
Why your TikTok videos look blurry
Almost every guide tells you to change your export bitrate. That is mostly beside the point. What is actually happening to your file, the three free settings that fix most blurry uploads, and one result we measured that nobody else publishes.
TikTok export settings that actually matter
Resolution, bitrate, frame rate and codec — which of them change anything, and which are folklore. Includes the one setting that inverts once nothing is re-encoding your file.
Why some videos stay 1080p and others drop to 576p
Eleven videos measured. Every one TikTok served at 1080p was 60 fps; every 30 fps upload came back at 576p. Includes the two better-looking theories that died against the data, and the limit on what any of it proves.
CapCut and TikTok quality
CapCut gets blamed for soft uploads and there is a whole genre of advice about stripping its metadata. We opened an export and read every byte. The metadata is harmless; the common advice can quietly work against you.
How these are written
Each guide states what was measured, how many files it was measured on, and what that does not prove. When a finding turns out to be wrong we correct the guide rather than quietly leave it — one of the pages here replaced an earlier version whose conclusion did not survive a closer look.
You can run the same measurements yourself on any public video with the quality checker, which is the tool every one of these guides was written with.
The tools
- Keep your quality — rebuild a video's container in your browser so TikTok takes less from it.
- Quality checker — see what TikTok is really serving for any public video.
- Downloader — save a video, with its quality shown first.
- Post to TikTok — send a prepared video straight to your drafts.