Convert from MOV to MP4 Container format

Question

I have a digital camera that records nice 1080p H.264 format but unfortunately it uses the MOV container format. Basically I have nothing but the camera and VLC that play this format natively.

Is there a tool out there to convert the video to a format by just replacing the container format? That'd be a lot faster as the encoding is perfectly fine.

It'd be nice to select the folder and convert everything over to a more respectable container format like MP4.

I don't want to touch the actual quality of the video I want the conversion to be as fast as possible.

Answer 1

I don't want to touch the actual quality of the video I want the conversion to be as fast as possible.

Use FFmpeg with -vcodec copy to just copy the contained data.

ffmpeg -i file.mov -vcodec copy -acodec copy out.mp4
ffmpeg -i file.mov -vcodec copy -acodec copy out.mkv

Download and install FFmpeg:

• Windows Zeranoe builds
• On OS X through Homebrew: brew install ffmpeg
• On Ubuntu Linux following this tutorial

Answer 2

VLC allows you to switch containers.

Select Media->Convert/Save, select files, Convert->Save, click "Create New Profile" icon, change container, mark keep original video and audio tracks.

Answer 3

You can re-pack MOV to MKV easily with mkvtoolnix. It has both command-line and GUI tools for Windows and Linux:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.mov

It just changes the container, without recoding anything. You said "more respecatble format like mp4, so I suppose MKV would work for you.

Answer 4

That should be easy to accomplish. I can recommend you using Audials, it's the soft that I usually use to convert files to different formats (but it does other things as well, like audio and video recording, DVD ripping, radio rec etc.). I have to admit that I haven't particularly tried converting mov to mp4 so far, but judging from my experience with it, it should be capable to do that. I know that it DOES convert mov files because there is a tutorial on how to convert it to avi format.