RunToolRunMOV to MP4
Convert MOV files to MP4 format.
How to Convert MOV to MP4
Select a MOV file
Click the upload area or drop the .mov video from your iPhone or Mac.
Re-encoding in your browser
The video is re-encoded as H.264 MP4 with AAC audio — the most compatible combination that exists.
Download the MP4
Save a video that plays on Windows, Android, smart TVs and every editor.
Often the same video in a different box
MOV is Apple's QuickTime container and MP4 is the ISO standard derived from it. They are close relatives, and a MOV recorded by an iPhone usually contains exactly the streams an MP4 expects: H.264 or HEVC video with AAC audio.
When that is the case the conversion can be a remux — the streams are copied into the new container without being decoded or re-encoded. It is fast, and the quality is identical because nothing was touched. Most phone footage falls into this category.
When it becomes a real re-encode
Professional MOV files are a different matter. Footage in ProRes, DNxHD, animation codecs or with uncompressed audio cannot simply be copied into an MP4 that other software will play, so it has to be decoded and re-encoded to H.264. That takes far longer and costs a generation of quality.
The size difference is dramatic in that case. ProRes is designed for editing rather than delivery and can occupy several gigabytes per minute; the H.264 MP4 produced from it may be a hundredth of the size. That is the intended trade — an editing master becomes a delivery file.
Why bother at all
MP4 is what everything accepts. Windows plays it without extra codecs, every social platform ingests it, every editor imports it, and upload forms that reject MOV outright are common. MOV works flawlessly inside the Apple ecosystem and causes friction the moment a file leaves it.
There is also the HEVC complication: a MOV from a recent iPhone may contain HEVC video, which some older players cannot decode even inside an MP4. If the file plays on your Mac and shows a black screen elsewhere, the codec rather than the container is the problem, and re-encoding to H.264 is the fix.
Rotation metadata and local processing
Phones record in a fixed sensor orientation and store a rotation flag rather than rotating the pixels. Players that honour the flag show the video upright; those that ignore it show it sideways. This is the usual cause of a converted video appearing rotated, and it is a property of the source file rather than of the conversion.
Conversion runs through FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for personal footage, and it is single-threaded, which means a long or high-resolution file will take a while. Trimming to the part you need before converting is the most effective way to shorten that.
Checking the result before deleting the original
Play the converted file somewhere other than the machine that made it — ideally on the device or platform it is destined for. The failures that matter show up immediately: no sound because the audio codec was not carried across, a sideways picture because of the rotation flag, or a black screen because the video is still in a codec the player cannot decode.
Keep the MOV until that check passes. It is the original and, if the conversion was a straight remux, it is identical in quality — there is nothing to gain by deleting it early and a real recording to lose if something went wrong.