Can I return a compressed iphone video to it's original quality?

[AC Question]

My friend took a few really cool videos of us longboarding with his iphone. He sent me the videos via text message, and the video was compressed way too much (probably because of length). He deleted them off of his phone shortly after so I'm stuck with the bad quality videos. Is there any way to return them to their original quality? The quality is so bad that it's not even fun to watch.

 

[Rukbat]

You can't return a compressed picture of any kind to its original quality, because lossy compression (what's used with pictures) consists of throwing information away. (Since most picture formats are already about as compressed as they can be, lossless compression actually makes the file larger, because it adds a header saying that the file was stored as-is.)