Video converting

Gamboodle · August 1, 2016

So me and my friend make and edit videos, he records, I edit, the only problem is that it's really difficult to edit his files sometimes because they're in an mp4 format. This may not be a problem if the software that I use would accept the mp4 file format. Because of this, I'm forced to use Windows Movie Maker, I have no problem with that software, it's just a bit more time consuming. I've looked into online and downloadable converters, but they either don't except the length of my video, you have to pay to use them, or in the case of the downloadable ones, they almost always come with some sort of virus, bloatware, or malware. If anyone could tell me a free, virus/bloatware free software or online converter, that would help a lot!

Thanks!

mariushm · August 1, 2016

MKVToolnix is a tool that allows you to convert pretty much any common audio/video format to a MKV file (matroska) : https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html

Unfortunately, I don't know how helpful this would be, as if an editing software won't support mp4, it's unlikely it would support mkv

Both MP4 and MKV are containers, they're a file format, they simply hold video and audio compressed with various codecs. In the case of MP4, the video is pretty much always compressed using h264 and the audio is almost always AAC, sometimes it's uncompressed audio (lpcm) or rarely mp3.

So it's not a question of your editing software supporting MP4, it's a issue of your editing software supporting the h264 video codec and the aac audio codec. Converting from mp4 file format to mkv or any other file format won't do anything if the video inside is kept in the same format (h264) and the video editing software doesn't know how to edit it.

If you're really forced to use a particular video editor and you have lots of disk space and your editing software works with AVI files, you can spend some time converting the MP4 files into an intermediate format without quality degradation, and at the end of editing you can compress the video to whatever format you want.

For example, you can install the MagicYUV codec (you can choose to pay $0 and it's legal, free) : https://gumroad.com/l/kxciS#

It's a lossless codec, meaning it can compress whatever you give it without quality degradation, but the downside is that is uses a lot of disk space

Now you can download Virtualdub and put in the plugins folder one of the plugins that allows you to open MP4 files directly (from the same page i link to here) : http://www.videohelp.com/software/Virtualdub (i used http://gral.y0.pl/~fcchandler/Plugins/QuickTime/ to open MP4 files inside Virtualdub 32bit )

Start virtualdub, load your mp4 file, go to Video menu, choose Full compression mode, go to Video and select compression and select MagicYUV lossless, and if you want you can go to Audio menu and play around with the audio, and when you're done go to File menu and save the file to AVI and you get a big file saved with this lossless codec that you should be able to edit in any video editor.

For a 720p movie, this lossless codec needs about 13-15 MB/s or about 800-1000 MB for each minute of video.

RedWulf · August 1, 2016

You might look into ffmpeg, free, simple, and safe; cant promise it suites your needs and you have to type commands(they have samples and its straight forward)