Converting from MOV to MP4 container?

[virtusdraco]

I'm new to working with MPEG4 video and these forums, so I hope this is the right place to post my question...

My camera (kodak dx7590) can capture video clips. It appears to capture them in a as MPEG4 video stream in a Quicktime MOV container.

Quicktime shows the following in the "show movie info" dialog:

Format:
MPEG-4 Video, 640x480, millions
mu-law 2:1, Mono, 16.000 kHz
FPS: 11.61

I'm guessing the video stream is ASP because QT usually lists the video format as "H.264" for AVC video streams.

I was wondering if there is a way I can convert these MOV files to a more standard MP4 container format without recompressing the video stream. I would like to reencode the audio to AAC of course to create a proper MP4 file.

I'm not familiar with most of the MP4 editing/conversion tools, so I'm not sure which one(s) I would need to read in this MOV container file and output an MP4 file with the MPEG4 video stream unchanged and the audio converted to AAC.

Thanks.

[bond]

i would guess that a possible way to do this is quicktime itself, altough i heard that there are some bugs in qt7

another possibility are the freely available 3ivx filters able to do remuxing in graphedit

[Pirks]

i would guess that a possible way to do this is quicktime itself, altough i heard that there are some bugs in qt7

QT7 Pro for Windows is a piece of s%#t (Mac version is OK tho) but it can do the job. First load your MOV into QT7 Pro, then export video only into mp4. Important: choose "passthrough" as your video export method. If you choose something else, QT7 will recompress your video. Next, export audio only in MP4, with reencoding to AAC-LC of course. Last step - join the AAC audio and video from MP4 and export both to MP4 again, don't forget to set "passthrough" for both audio and video. If everything goes ok you'll get your MP4 with the same video (not recompressed) but with audio recompressed to AAC-LC.

This is very brief description, read QT Player docs for details. There you find more about exporting, muxing etc.


another possibility are the freely available 3ivx filters able to do remuxing in graphedit

Yeah, I suppose 3ivx will do the same, but it'll require some tinkering with GraphEdit. Construct a reencoding graph where 3ivx media splitter sucks data from your MOV and if (only if!) it can parse your mu-law 2:1 audio you can attach 3ivx audio encoder to that stream, then stuff encoded audio from this encoder into the 3ivx media muxer. Pass video output directly from 3ivx media splitter to 3ivx media muxer, since you don't wanna reencode it. Attach output of 3ivx media muxer to a file writer and see if this works :-)

[Elias]

Just to be on the safe side, when you've exported your mov files to mp4 in QTPro... make sure to extract the video and audio tracks from that mp4 file with MP4Box, and then re-import them to an MP4Box generated mp4 file, so that you can get the Apple brand off your balls from your mp4 files. Why? Apple's mp4 files are not to be trusted. For example, they signal the wrong profile (it's like ALWAYS Advanced Simple Profile if they're isma mp4 files, in spite of the fact that the video actually might be Simple Profile). MP4Box does the job properly.

i would guess that a possible way to do this is quicktime itself, altough i heard that there are some bugs in qt7bond is talking about an issue I ran into with the latest QT build (7.0.3 50) where it sometimes gave me b0rked atom size files... or something like that. These mp4 files played great in VLC etc, but couldn't be imported into MP4Box/mp4UI. Then it just worked for some reason. So I don't trust Apple anymore (not that I had huge trust in them).