How to Share Your IPhone .MOV Videos As MP4s (and Why You Should Do It)
The iPhone is great for recording videos, but you might run into some issues when it comes to compatibility. If you’ve recorded a video and want to send raw files to a friend using Android or Windows, the video may not play on their device if it’s encoded in Apple’s new HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) or .MOV format.
If you’re sharing a video with a non-iPhone user, your best bet is to change the file type to the .MP4 format supported on all major platforms, which is thankfully as easy as converting images or documents these days.
For small videos on iPhone, use a free online conversion tool.
You’ll find plenty of video converters on the App Store, but most of them require you to sign up for a $5/month subscription. Instead, you can skip the apps and use online video converters directly – they are easy to use, free, and don’t add a watermark to your video. The FreeConvert website is a good option. You can upload videos up to 1GB for free (the site also supports batch conversion).
If you’re afraid to upload your personal videos to a website just to convert them, FreeConvert has a good privacy policy: all videos are secured with 256-bit SSL encryption and all videos are automatically deleted four hours after conversion.
Converting your videos is quite easy. Open the site and select a video from the gallery. The website will automatically select MP4 as the output format, but you can switch to another format from the drop-down list. Then click the ” Convert to MP4 ” button, wait for the website to do its thing, and click the ” Download MP4 ” button to download the converted video.
For large videos and large projects, use the free Handbrake app.
FreeConvert is great for converting multiple small videos together, but what if you have an hour-long video podcast that weighs in at 5GB? Or you don’t want to upload videos to a web server?
To do this, you can use a Mac or Windows computer and download the free and open source Handbrake app. It’s a clunky looking app that doesn’t do well with batch conversion, but it’s a great video encoder. The free app comes with many presets for different formats and you can convert videos with any amount of detail or less detail.
After opening the app, select the video file. When you open a .MOV file, the Handbrake application defaults to an output .MP4 file with a pretty good conversion profile called “Fast1080p30”. This will give you 1080p output at 30fps and it won’t take long either. You can also go to the Preset dropdown to switch between different profiles (from a 4K preset to something just for sharing via Discord servers). At the bottom, select an output folder and click the “Start” button at the top to get started.
Then switch the iPhone video recording format to MP4.
If you plan to shoot a lot of videos that will be shared with Android or Windows users, it’s best to simply change the video recording format on the iPhone itself. Go to ” Settings ” > “Camera ” > ” Formats ” and switch to ” Most Compatible “. Your iPhone will then save photos as JPEGs and videos as MP4s, making it easy to share them with anyone online.