MKV to MOV converter

Mostly Mac users with an OBS recording that Final Cut Pro, iMovie or QuickTime Player will not open. Older OBS setups and many Windows machines record MKV, and the file lands on a Mac that does not read it. Others have an MKV from a capture card, a game console or a download and a Mac workflow built around QuickTime movies. The picture inside is usually H.264, which Apple’s apps read every day, so the fix is a new container around the same video, not a new video.

It is the box, not the video. Apple’s list for Final Cut Pro names MOV, MP4 and a few camera formats, and no Matroska. iMovie and QuickTime Player read the same QuickTime family of files and turn MKV away just the same, usually by greying the file out in the import window or saying it is not compatible. Inside, an OBS recording is nearly always H.264 video, which all three play without complaint once it sits in a MOV or MP4.

Recent versions of macOS let apps add formats through Media Extensions, and Final Cut Pro supports them. If you installed an extension that reads MKV, the file may already import; if not, a rewrap is quicker than hunting for one.

A QuickTime movie can hold H.264 video and AAC sound, which is what OBS, capture cards and most downloads put in an MKV. So the page reads each frame and each sound packet out of the MKV and writes it into the MOV unchanged. Nothing is decoded or compressed again, the picture is identical, and the finished file is labelled Copied without re-encoding, so no quality was lost. The page then opens the MOV it made and checks the codecs and the length before you can save it.

An OBS recording can have up to six audio tracks, often desktop sound on one and your microphone on another. QuickTime Player and most players only play the first, so the page lists the tracks by the names OBS gave them and you choose the one to keep. If you need every track separately in Final Cut Pro, use the ffmpeg command below, which copies them all into the MOV.

Subtitle tracks are left out, and the page tells you how many as soon as you choose the file. HEVC (H.265) video is turned into H.264 by default, which takes longer and needs a browser that decodes HEVC (not Firefox); tick Keep HEVC as it is to copy it instead, labelled hvc1 the way Apple’s apps expect. Final Cut Pro and QuickTime both play HEVC, so on a Mac keeping it is usually the better choice. If you are still choosing how to record, our comparison with OBS covers when a simpler screen recorder saves this step.

If you use OBS 32 or later, set the recording format to Hybrid MOV (the default for new profiles on a Mac) and future recordings arrive as MOV, crash-safe, with no conversion. Older OBS versions can record straight to MOV too, at the risk of losing the file if OBS crashes.

Converting changes the container, not what is inside. It cannot fix a recording that stutters, drifts out of sync or was cut short by a crash, and it does not make an H.264 recording easier to edit. If Final Cut Pro feels slow on long H.264 footage, let it make optimised or proxy media on import, or record ProRes in OBS 32 on a Mac. This page cannot make ProRes: browsers cannot encode it.