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MOV to MP4
Convert MOV to MP4 Online — Free & Instant
Turn QuickTime MOV recordings into MP4 files that play everywhere.
About MOV to MP4
MOV is Apple's QuickTime container, and it is what an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac screen recording hands you. MP4 is what everything else asks for. The two containers are close relatives — both are ISO base media files — so a MOV holding H.264 video can become an MP4 by rewriting the wrapper alone, with the compressed video and audio copied across untouched. That takes milliseconds and costs nothing in quality. The catch is that iPhones have shot H.265 (HEVC) by default for years, and an H.265 file wrapped as .mp4 is still an H.265 file: it will play on newer Apple hardware and fail on plenty of the places people are actually trying to upload to. So this tool reads the video stream before doing anything and tells you which case you are in. If it is H.264, it rewraps and says nothing was re-encoded. If it is H.265, it offers a real conversion to H.264 as a separate, clearly-labelled choice — slower, and lossy, because every frame is decoded and encoded again. Everything runs in your browser through FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly.
Questions
Will my iPhone video convert instantly?
It depends on what the phone recorded. iPhones have shot H.265 (HEVC) by default for years — that codec is rewrapped just as fast, but an H.265 file called .mp4 still will not play in a lot of places, so the tool offers an H.264 conversion instead and says how it differs. Older or 'Most Compatible' recordings are already H.264 and are rewrapped losslessly in milliseconds.
How do I know which codec my MOV holds?
The tool reads it off the file and shows you before you commit to anything. That probe is the whole point: without it, a converter has to guess, and the wrong guess produces a file that looks converted and does not play.
Does the quality change?
Not when the file is rewrapped — the compressed video is copied across untouched, so the output is the same picture at the same bitrate. If you choose the H.264 conversion for an H.265 source, that is a genuine re-encode and does cost some quality.
Why does the first conversion take longer than the next one?
The first run downloads the FFmpeg engine — about 31 MB of WebAssembly, served from this site's own origin rather than a CDN — and keeps it in memory for the rest of the session. The conversion itself is the fast part.
How large a MOV can I convert?
Up to 1.5 GB. The limit is enforced before the run starts rather than discovered halfway through it, because the rewrapped copy has to fit in the browser tab alongside the original.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.