Convert .mov to .mp4 on a 🍎 Mac

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Quicktime is a great tool to make screen recordings on a Mac, for example for a product demo.

The problem is that Quicktime creates files in the MOV format, which take up a lot of disk space (500Mb for 5 minutes of video).

Compress

We’re going to convert that big file to .mp4 which will compress it to a more manageable size (64Mb for 5 minutes).

We’ll use ffmpeg, a command line tool, to do that.

Install ffmpeg

First, to install ffmpeg, open Terminal and run this command.

brew install ffmpeg

(Requires homebrew, which by the way is a great way to install software on Mac.)

Convert .mov to .mp4

Now, to convert, run this command:

ffmpeg -i demo.mov -vcodec h264 demo.mp4

Note: you’ll probably need to change the name of the input from demo.mov to whatever you’re using (as well as the output, demo.mp4).

Cheers, that’s it! 🍻 You should now have a smaller .mp4 video file.

Check out the code used here and other helpful code snippets in my Github gists.