MOV to MP4
Turn a QuickTime file from an iPhone or camera into an MP4 anything will open.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
MOV and MP4 are cousins
MP4 was derived from the QuickTime format, and most MOV files from an iPhone already contain h.264 video and AAC audio, the exact codecs MP4 uses. What trips software up is the container and the occasional Apple-specific track.
If your MOV holds ProRes rather than h.264, which is common from professional cameras and Final Cut exports, this conversion will take considerably longer, because ProRes frames are large and must be fully decoded first.
HEVC, and the file that will not open on Windows
Since iOS 11, iPhones record in HEVC (h.265) by default rather than h.264, inside a .mov container. It halves the file size and is the reason a modern iPhone video often refuses to open on a Windows machine without a paid codec from the Microsoft Store, or drops into an editor as audio with a black picture. Converting to h.264 here solves that permanently, at the cost of a larger file for the same quality.
If you would rather avoid the issue at source, iPhones have a setting under Camera, Formats, called Most Compatible, which records h.264 directly. It is worth turning on if your footage regularly goes to a PC.
Rotation, and why iPhone video arrives sideways
Phones record in whatever orientation the sensor is in and write a rotation flag into the file rather than turning the pixels. Good players read the flag. Plenty of editors, uploaders and websites do not, which is why an iPhone clip that looks correct in Photos appears on its side after upload. This conversion carries the flag across correctly, so a player that respected it before will respect it after.
If the destination is one of the tools that ignores the flag, that is not fixable by converting. Use rotate video, which turns the actual pixels and clears the flag, so the file looks the same everywhere regardless of what is reading it.
What ProRes footage means for your patience
ProRes is an intermediate codec, designed to be fast to edit rather than small to store, and it runs to gigabytes per minute. Every frame is close to a full picture, so there is a great deal to read off disk and decode before any encoding starts. A short ProRes clip is fine. Anything long is worth trimming with cut video first, and worth checking with media info beforehand so the wait is expected rather than alarming.
Common questions
Why did my file get much smaller?
iPhone MOV files are recorded at a high bitrate. Re-encoding at the default quality typically halves the size with no visible difference.
Does this handle iPhone rotation correctly?
Yes. If the picture still comes out sideways in some other app, run it through the rotate tool, which bakes the orientation into the pixels.