In this video, I’ll show you how to convert an MOV video file to an MP4 video file for free using HandBrake.
Video Transcript
In this video, I’ll show you how to convert an MOV video file to an MP4 video file for free using HandBrake.
Welcome to this video. My name is David. And for the purposes of this video, HandBrake is a free open source video transcoder that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Therefore, if you’re using any other platform, other than Windows, where I’ll be showing this tutorial, then just know that HandBrake is available for you.
So that’s out of the way, and I’ll leave a link to HandBrake below. It’s free, it’s open source and all that.
So I already have my video file here, it’s my son. And most of the videos recorded on an iPhone, the extension is MOV. So sometimes, MOV files are not compatible with other applications and you may need to convert the MOV to an MP4 file.
So if we just hover over this, you’ll see that it’s an MOV video file. And if you check the details, you’ll see the same thing.
So we can just bring this down.
And I already have HandBrake open in the background.
So all we need to do inside here is pretty simple. Just drag your file onto here.
And once we drag it, we can just maximize this. And this is what it looks like.
Some of the important things is that if you’re going to be using a preset, for example, by default, we get the fast preset 1080p 30.
If you want to use a preset that you have already created for your videos, and I have a video on how to create custom presets, then you can choose one from the side.
But before you start making any changes here, then you need to choose a preset that will work best for you.
So this particular video is in something called 1080p, that is 1920 by 1080. That is the dimensions of this particular video.
So I really know that 1080p 30 is good and 30 is the 30 frames per second. And this video is in 30 frames per second.
So I’m sorted for that.
So as for the formats, there are three formats you can convert to.
And that is an MP4, MKV or WebM video.
So if you wanted to convert MOV to MKV, MKV to MP4, MOV to WebM really depends on what you want, you can do that inside HandBrake.
So once you’ve set the preset, we want the fast 1080 p 30.
You can check the summary, set the format that you want.
And then you can check or a counter check the dimensions ensure that the width that is going to be here is the same as what you have as the source.
Sometimes for some strange reason, HandBrake may end up clipping some of these dimensions.
So always make sure that you know are the exact dimensions or input the exact dimensions.
For example, if it was saving something else here, I just typed in 1920. So it looks good. There’s nothing else to change there.
As for, the filters, I will not change anything.
And then we go to the video, the video, or let’s say you want to choose a codec, you can choose any of these codecs, but I’ll just leave it as it is here are h265 produces a smaller video file. And more or less, I believe, some better quality.
But let’s leave it as h264.
The frames we’ve, from the summary, we have 30 frames per second.
So we’ll just leave it at 30 frames per second, and then go for peak frame rate. And for this one, we’ll just use the default 22 for this quality.
So you can bring this down for lower quality file, or basically just put it to the other end.
And this one gives you a bigger file but it’s lossless, let’s leave it at 22.
And that’s what you can do.
But if you wanted to target a particular bitrate, then you can use this one as well.
So for the audio, you can mix down to mono.
You can change this bitrate to whatever you want, really depends on your preference.
As for the subtitles, if you had a subtitle for this particular video, then you can import the subtitle and add it to this video.
If you want it to focus on any chapters, or create chapters, you can import and export. You can do that from here.
The final step or the second last step is to save the video you can browse so that you can save your video where you want it to be saved.
Really depends on where you want. Let’s just choose a location for this.
Let’s see. We just want this “converted”.
And then let’s just click on Save.
So we’ve set the folder to be the same folder with the source.
But we’ve changed the naming and all that.
And then the extension will be MP4, if you wanted MKV, you can choose that WebM you can choose that.
Let’s go for MP4, and then click on Save.
Now, that’s the second last step.
And the final step is to click on Start Encode.
And depending on the strength of your laptop, this may take a long or short time, and also the length of the file that you’re working on.
But since this is a short file, I believe it’s going to blaze through.
So let’s just hit start encode and wait for our MOV file to be converted into MP4.
So here we are, it’s blazing through that it’s encoding pass one of one and the percentage – Time remaining, like 16 seconds. So it’s really small job.
And basically, HandBrake is an awesome application if you ever in a sport where you want to convert files from one format to the other, or even if you want to permanently add subtitles to a video, you can use HandBrake for that.
So there we go. It’s done converting.
And if we navigate to the folder, we now have two files.
We have one which is an MOV the original file and the second one is an MP4. And you’ll notice that the sizes are almost the same.
So chances are that there is no significant loss in quality once we converted this particular video from MOV to MP4.
So that is how you can convert an MOV video file into an MP4 for free using HandBrake.
Thanks for watching this video.
My name is David.
Until next time, stay safe and never stop learning.
Thanks for watching.