What you should know
MOV is Apple's historical container, introduced with QuickTime in 1991. It served as the basis for the MP4 standard and shares a very similar structure.
It appears mainly in iPhone output, QuickTime exports and professional editing pipelines, where it commonly carries ProRes, H.264 or HEVC.
Strengths
- Excellent support on macOS and iOS
- Accepts many codecs, including professional formats such as ProRes
- Editing-friendly structure with rich tracks and metadata
- Frequently converts to MP4 without re-encoding
Limitations to know
- Limited support on Windows and Android, where codecs may be missing
- Often large files, especially in ProRes
- Less readily accepted by sharing platforms than MP4
- Some HEVC MOV files will not open outside the Apple ecosystem
When to use it
Keep MOV if you work in the Apple ecosystem or in professional editing. As soon as you need to share, publish or play on an unknown device, convert to MP4: the container is more universal and the conversion can be lossless.
Quality, size and compatibility
An H.264 MOV to MP4 is a simple container change: tracks are copied, nothing is lost. A ProRes MOV to MP4, on the other hand, requires re-encoding to a consumer codec, with unavoidable loss that is usually invisible to the eye.
Frequently asked questions
- Are MOV and MP4 compatible?
- Yes, their structures are very close. An H.264 MOV converts to MP4 by simply copying tracks, which preserves quality and is much faster than re-encoding.
- Why will my MOV not open on Windows?
- Windows handles the MOV container but not always the codec inside it, notably HEVC or ProRes. Converting to MP4 H.264 solves the problem.