I recently came across an old video saved on my hard drive — it was recorded years ago on a very low-end phone. The quality is honestly terrible: super blurry, pixelated, and almost unwatchable on a bigger screen.
It’s only 240p, and I was wondering:
Is there any way to actually improve this kind of video quality, or is it just hopeless?
I’ve always thought low-resolution videos are basically “fixed” in quality — like you can’t really bring back missing details. But I decided to try an AI tool just out of curiosity.
I used HitPaw VikPea to test whether it could actually make a noticeable difference.
I didn’t expect much, but I ran the video through its enhancement models:
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AI Video Upscaler (HD & 4K output)
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Denoise model (to reduce compression artifacts)
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Face enhancement (since the video had a person in it)
Original video (240p)
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Resolution: 426 × 240
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Very heavy pixelation when played fullscreen
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Faces looked “muddy” and unclear
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Background details completely lost
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Any movement caused strong blur trails
Honestly, it felt like watching a video through a foggy window.
After enhancement with VikPea
1080p version
After processing, the video was upscaled to 1080p.
What I noticed:
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The image looked noticeably cleaner
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Face shapes became more recognizable
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Noise and blocky artifacts were reduced a lot
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The video was actually watchable on a laptop screen
It didn’t look like a “new HD video”, but it definitely felt upgraded.
From my experience, you can’t truly restore lost details from 240p, but AI tools like HitPaw VikPea can make a huge difference in how the video feels when watching it.
If the goal is:
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sharing old memories
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cleaning up low-quality clips
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or making old footage usable again
Then yes — the improvement is definitely noticeable enough to be worth it.
Just don’t expect it to magically turn 240p into native 4K camera quality. It’s more like a smart reconstruction than a real “restore”.