How to convert iPhone (MOV) videos so they play anywhere

2026-07-13

Every video your iPhone records is saved as a .MOV file — Apple's QuickTime container. It plays perfectly on Apple devices, but the moment you try to open it on a Windows PC that doesn't have QuickTime installed, share it to a website that expects MP4, or send it to an Android phone, it often just... doesn't open, or opens with no sound, or refuses to upload at all.

The fix: convert MOV to MP4

MP4 with H.264 video is the closest thing video has to a universal format — it plays on essentially every phone, computer, browser, and upload form that exists. Our MOV to MP4 tool re-packages your iPhone clip into a standard MP4, and it does the whole conversion locally, inside your own browser tab, using your device's own hardware — your video is never uploaded to a server. That matters for iPhone footage in particular, since a lot of it is personal: kids, family events, screen recordings of something private.

What to expect

Upload the MOV file, wait while your browser decodes and re-encodes it (this uses your phone or computer's own processor, so it's roughly as fast as your device can handle video, typically real-time or faster for a short clip), and download the resulting MP4. Files up to 300MB on desktop (100MB on mobile) and up to 30 minutes long on desktop (10 on mobile) are supported, since the tool does have to fully re-encode the video track. You'll need a reasonably current browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari — since the encoding relies on the browser's own WebCodecs support.

Just need the sound, not the video?

If what you actually want out of a video is the audio — a voice memo you recorded as video by accident, the audio from an interview, a song someone filmed — you don't need to convert the whole video first. Our Extract audio from video tool works directly on MOV (and MP4, WebM, MKV, OGV, AVI) and pulls out just the sound, skipping the video track entirely, which is faster and produces a much smaller file than converting the video and then discarding it.

Everything stays on your device

Both tools run entirely through WebAssembly and WebCodecs in your browser — nothing about the conversion process involves our server. That's worth knowing if the footage is something you'd rather not hand over to a random web service: it never leaves your phone or computer to begin with.