Natively read by macOS, you can basically just copy the streams from one container format to another one. If you’re lucky and the codecs for all the streams inside the container can be Leaving the already encoded material untouched if possible. So the key is to either always directly encode from the original material (e.g.

This means that every time you re-encode video, you will lose some information, normallyĮnding up in worse quality. To consider: Almost all video codecs are lossy. Audio: AAC (since it’s Apple native) or AC3įfmpeg, besides having a cryptic command line interface, makes it relatively easy to get from anything to MP4.Video: H.265 (on newer Macs or iDevices > 2016) or H.264.MacOS can natively decode different types of video and audio streams, here is what I prefer and what I want my video files to look like: Their respective codecs like H.264 for video or AAC for audio. Streams of data (video, audio, subtitles) with different codecs into a single MKV or MP4 file. Instead, both are video container formats. To get there from almost any source material.įirst off, neither MKV nor MP4 are video codecs.

Videos from all my Apple devices without the need for additional software, like VLC or IINA.įor many people not that deep into video file formats I want to explain what the supported formats for video on macOS are and how

The main reason for this is that I want to be able to play back I recently started to convert all of my movies from MKV to MP4.

Converting mkv to mp4 ffmpeg