Export MOV to MP4 with Quicktime on Yosemite

Question

I have a screen capture of my computer screen using QuickTime's Screen Recording feature, but that saves it to an MOV format. I'd like to export it to MP4. Is that possible without installing anything else?

I'm using Yosemite, and I'm pretty sure I could do that with Mavericks.

I do not have Yosemite, but does the File-Export no longer works — Ruskes, Jan 03 '15 at 04:16
Negative @Buscar웃 it only allows you to export as mov it doesn't even given give your a file type export option. — Mark Tomlin, Jan 03 '15 at 05:42
sorry, i do not know how without installing a simple app to do that. — Ruskes, Jan 03 '15 at 06:58
Suffixes can be misleading, especially for video files. Why does it have to be MP4 and/or what do you intend to do with the screen capture afterwards? — nohillside, Jan 04 '15 at 00:20
Posting to a website, so I was going for a de facto web standard. — Mark Tomlin, Jan 04 '15 at 05:47

score 92 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 28 '18 at 14:59

92

If you have ffmpeg installed, it is quite easy to do it

ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4

If you don't, install it as follows:

Press Command + Space, type "Terminal" and press enter/return key.
Run this command in the Terminal app:
```
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
```
and press enter/return key.

If the screen prompts you to enter a password, enter your Mac's user password to continue. When you type the password, it won't be displayed on the screen, but the system would accept it. So just type your password and press ENTER/RETURN key. Then wait for the command to finish.
After that, run:
```
brew install ffmpeg
```
Done! You can now run ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4.

(For more information, you can refer to this site, or you can go directly to the official FFmpeg website: ffmpeg.org.)

edited Sep 28 '18 at 14:59

jaume

15,010

answered Mar 17 '17 at 02:09

coffekid

1,021

1

I had a non-standard video resolution (750x1334) due to it being a screen capture from an iPhone 6, and tried Apple's Compressor product, but that failed to support the resolution. This worked perfectly. – andrewb Apr 06 '17 at 06:02
1

Most of the time you can speed up the process by copying video and audio data instead of transcoding. Like this: ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4 (mov is very similar to mp4 and most of the time contains h264 video and aac audio, which is equally supported in mp4). – ernesto che Apr 02 '20 at 11:19
@ernestoche That is a fast way of converting between formats, however the resulting mp4 file might not be usable for most quicktime users. – coffekid Apr 04 '20 at 04:58
@coffekid I would be very surprised if .mov containing h264 and aac produced by quicktime would not "usable" if its video and audio streams are losslessly repackaged to .mp4. At least it always worked for me. – ernesto che Apr 08 '20 at 18:55
@ernestoche I don't know the details about that, but it has happened to me in the past, that files are not usable for quicktime, although they work perfectly for other programs, such as mpv. – coffekid Apr 09 '20 at 19:18
@ernestoche's method will also prevent quality loss from re-encoding. – Wowfunhappy May 12 '20 at 13:01
@ernestoche I thought you could just rename the file if you want to do that. But I convert to MP4 to reduce the file size. It's a 5x size reduction! Crazy... – ADTC Aug 20 '23 at 15:08

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 19 '15 at 08:02

15

After having your screen recorded and the file in MOV format, you could use iMovie to convert it to MP4.

open the file in iMovie
File / Share / File...
adjust your preferences in the dialog box
press "Next..."
the created file will be in MP4

Hope this helps. Cheers!

answered Aug 19 '15 at 08:02

Adriana Mandjarova

166

It seems that in QuickTime 10.4 under 10.11.6 it appears the File > Share > File... option no longer exists. I was able to export a video similarly for a tweet by using File > Export > iPad, iPhone, iPod touch & Apple TV.... – Taylor D. Edmiston Aug 14 '16 at 18:16
As iMovie was preinstalled, this is the most correct answer. Thank you (from 6 years later.) – Mark Tomlin Nov 13 '21 at 02:14
iMovie artificially limits the resolution and aspect ratio to a handful of options which are usually completely inappropriate for the file you're attempting to convert. ffmpeg is the "most correct answer". – rw-nandemo Jul 27 '22 at 20:28

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 16 '19 at 17:08

5

I know this is an older post but in case you run across this answer and you're using High Sierra, you can open a .mov file in Photos and export as video which will save it as an m4v file (which can easily be renamed to .mp4 in Finder afterwards).

edited Apr 16 '19 at 17:08

nohillside

100,768

answered Sep 08 '18 at 20:21

Barb

51

don.aymar · Answer 4 · 2018-03-19T20:07:30.903

1

In Quicktime..

File > Export > iPad, iPhone...

Lets you select a device and export M4V file - which is technically MP4 format.

Not sure of the player limitations it introduces. Dealing with this right now as well. Trying to share a screen capture video with colleagues who will be accessing on Windows machines.

edited Mar 19 '18 at 20:07

answered Mar 19 '18 at 19:55

don.aymar

11

score -1 · Answer 5 · edited May 12 '20 at 09:47

-1

Handbrake is the only tool you need for Mac OS X as it can covert pretty much any video format and it's open source and free.

edited May 12 '20 at 09:47

Community

1

answered Dec 11 '15 at 04:54

Ken

31

Actually Handbrake solved this very easily for me. – T. Junghans May 12 '20 at 07:57

Export MOV to MP4 with Quicktime on Yosemite

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