MOV to MP4, without losing quality

MOV and MP4 are two boxes for the same video

MOV is the QuickTime file format, made by Apple for its own media framework. Because QuickTime support lives mainly on Apple devices, MOV is no longer widely used on the internet, while MP4 plays in all browsers (MDN). The video and sound inside a MOV from an iPhone or a Mac are usually H.264 or HEVC with AAC sound, and an MP4 can hold exactly those. So in most cases nothing has to be converted at all: the tool lifts each piece of video and sound out of the MOV and writes it into an MP4, in the same order, with the same timing.

This is what the tool does with each kind of MOV it is given:

When something cannot be copied, the panel says so before you press the button, and names the bitrate it will use instead. It never picks a quality for you without telling you.

iPhone videos: HEVC or H.264

An iPhone records in one of two formats. Apple calls them High Efficiency, which is HEVC, and Most Compatible, which is H.264 (Apple). Apple's specifications for the iPhone 17 say it records both and plays HEVC, H.264 and AV1 (Apple). Copying keeps whichever one your MOV has, so an HEVC MOV becomes an HEVC MP4.

That matters on Windows: Media Player plays H.264 out of the box, but HEVC needs the HEVC Video Extension from the Microsoft Store (Microsoft). If the MP4 must open on any computer, or in an editor or website that refuses HEVC, choose Convert to H.264. The picture is then decoded and encoded again, starting from about 1.6 times the HEVC bitrate, because H.264 needs more data than HEVC for the same detail. In our tests, ten seconds of 1080p HEVC became H.264 in about 4 to 5.5 seconds on a laptop in Chrome.

When your iPhone converts for you

You may not need this tool every time. Apple says that when you send HEVC with AirDrop, Messages or email to a device that does not support it, the iPhone may share it in a more compatible format such as H.264, and that importing to a PC over USB may convert it too, unless Keep Originals is turned on in the Photos settings (Apple).

This tool is for the cases those do not cover: a MOV that is already on a Windows PC or an Android phone, a file someone sent you as it was recorded, a clip from a camera that writes MOV, or a website or app that only takes MP4 files.

MOV to MP4 on a Mac

QuickTime Player can save a movie with Greater Compatibility (H.264) instead of HEVC (Apple), but the result is still a MOV. Apple's QuickTime Player guide says movies are exported as QuickTime movies (.mov) with H.264 or HEVC, and that QuickTime Player does not export MP4 (Apple). Renaming a .mov file to .mp4 only changes its name, not the box the video sits in.

For a real MP4, open this page in your browser on the Mac and drop the MOV here. An H.264 or HEVC movie is copied into the new file in seconds, and the MOV stays where it was, untouched.

On an iPhone, an Android phone or a Windows PC

On an iPhone, open this page in Safari, tap Choose a video and pick the MOV. When you press Download, Safari saves the MP4 to the Downloads folder of the Files app (Apple).

On Android, Chrome keeps the MP4 with the rest of your downloads: tap More, then Downloads, or look in the Files app (Google).

On a Windows PC, Chrome and Edge both copy an HEVC MOV into an MP4. Converting it to H.264 is another matter: on our test laptop Chrome could decode HEVC and Edge could not, so in Edge the tool offered to keep HEVC instead.

Large MOV files

There is no size cap. The MOV is read from your device a little at a time, so a large file is not a problem for reading; what matters is the MP4, which is about as big as the MOV when it is copied. On a computer, Chrome and Edge write an MP4 of more than 500 MB straight into a file you choose, so a long recording never has to fit in memory. Other browsers, and phones, hold the MP4 in memory until you download it, so on a phone keep it under about 200 MB, or cut the video into parts first.

Copying is quick because nothing is decoded. In our tests in Chrome and Edge, a 4 MB, ten-second MOV took 30 to 45 milliseconds, and a 253 MB, ten-minute 720p recording (an MKV, copied the same way) about 0.6 seconds.

Your location stays out of the MP4

A MOV from an iPhone can carry the place it was recorded, the date, and the phone model, written as metadata. The MP4 made here is written with none of it: no location, no recording date, no make or model, no title. In our test we checked the new files byte by byte for the location, phone and title we had put into the test MOV, and found none.

The picture and sound are untouched by this: removing metadata never changes how the video looks.

Which browsers convert MOV to MP4

A copy reads and writes packets without a video decoder, so it runs even in a browser that cannot show the MOV's picture. Turning HEVC into H.264, or PCM sound into AAC, needs WebCodecs: Chrome and Edge 94 or later, Firefox 130 or later on computers, Samsung Internet 17 or later, and Safari 26 or later for full support (caniuse). Whether HEVC can be decoded also depends on the device, as the Windows test above shows.