Convert MP4 to MOV online

How to convert MP4 to MOV in your browser

1. 01

   Open the file

   Drag your MP4 onto the drop zone above, or click it and pick the file. If a dragged file appears to do nothing, click the drop zone and choose it instead — the drag handler only accepts files your operating system has labelled as video, and it labels some MP4 files as nothing at all. Either way it is read straight off your disk into the browser tab; nothing is sent anywhere.

2. 02

   Check that MOV is selected

   The Output format control below the timeline is already set to MOV on this page. Before you press anything, read the remux section below — if your MP4 is already H.264, you may not need to re-encode at all.

3. 03

   Optionally cap the resolution or mute

   Max resolution caps the height at 1080p, 720p or 480p (it never upscales), and Mute audio drops the audio track. Both are optional and both are applied in the same pass as the conversion.

4. 04

   Press Convert video

   With no cuts or speed changes queued, the apply button reads "Convert video". Press it. The first run downloads the ~32 MB FFmpeg engine, which the browser caches for next time.

5. 05

   Download

   When the encode finishes a download link appears with the size of the finished file next to it. Compare it against the original before you delete anything.

Who needs a MOV, and who only thinks they do

MOV is QuickTime's container and the native format of the Apple video world: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Compressor, Motion, QuickTime Player and the Photos app all speak it first. Some delivery specs — broadcasters, agencies, stock-footage sites, a certain kind of client brief — still say ".mov" because that is what they have said since 2005. And a handful of tools, mostly older Mac software, genuinely will not import anything else.

Most of those are habit rather than necessity. Final Cut Pro and iMovie both import an H.264 MP4 directly. QuickTime Player plays one. If a workflow insists on MOV, the first thing to ask is whether it insists on ProRes — in which case a MOV containing H.264, which is what this page makes, will not satisfy it either, and you need a desktop encoder that can write ProRes. If the spec just says MOV and does not name a codec, the H.264 MOV from here is fine.

What changes between MP4 and MOV

Almost nothing structurally. MP4 was standardised from QuickTime's format, and the two are siblings in the ISO base media family — same boxes, same track model, same moov header and mdat payload. Both carry H.264 and AAC natively. A MOV holding the same streams as an MP4 differs by a brand identifier and a few header details, and most software treats them interchangeably.

What this page does for a container change is a re-encode all the same: FFmpeg decodes the MP4 and writes H.264 with libx264 (ultrafast, CRF 28) plus AAC into a MOV. The exception is muting with nothing else changed, where the editor first copies the video stream (-c:v copy -an) into the MOV and only re-encodes if that copy fails. The MOV is written with +frag_keyframe+empty_moov, meaning it is fragmented, like the MP4 output. Current versions of Final Cut, iMovie and QuickTime open fragmented files; a much older QuickTime 7-era tool might not, which is one more reason the remux below is often the better route for this particular pair.

Quality and size

Since MOV and MP4 carry the identical H.264 stream, the quality difference between the two containers is zero; the only quality change here comes from the re-encode itself, which costs one generation at CRF 28. The size will usually go up a little because ultrafast is not economical with bits. If the MP4 is going into an editor to be cut and exported again anyway, that extra generation matters slightly more than usual, and it is the strongest argument for remuxing instead.

Where the re-encode earns its keep is when the MP4 is not H.264 — an HEVC file from a newer phone, or a VP9 MP4 from a download tool. Those decode here and come out as H.264, which every version of every Apple application handles.

When a lossless remux is the better answer: usually

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy out.mov

Of the six conversions on this site, this is the one where a remux is most often the right choice. An H.264/AAC MP4 rewrapped into a MOV with -c copy is a perfect copy — identical picture, identical sound, done in seconds — and it produces a conventional non-fragmented MOV that even elderly Apple software accepts. If you have FFmpeg installed, or can install it, do this instead. The FFmpeg guide explains the command.

Use the re-encode on this page when you cannot run FFmpeg, when the MP4 holds HEVC or VP9 rather than H.264, or when you are also cutting, speeding up or downscaling the clip — in which case a re-encode was going to happen anyway and doing the container change in the same pass is free.

What stays the same on every conversion here

Nothing is uploaded. The file is read from your disk into the tab, FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly does the decode and the encode there, and the result is handed back as a download. What does and does not leave your device is spelled out in full. There is no account, no watermark and no size cap other than the memory of the device you are on, since the whole file lives in RAM while it is being worked on.

The first conversion downloads the engine, roughly 32 MB, which the browser caches afterwards. Where SharedArrayBuffer is available the multi-threaded core is used and the encode runs across your CPU cores; otherwise a single-threaded build takes over and the same job takes several times longer. How it works walks through the pipeline, and the FAQ covers the rest.

Questions about converting MP4 to MOV