Convert mov to avi: Mov2Avi

I spent a long, long time trying to do this for free. I looked and tried lots and lots of freeware and open source. This is what finally worked. Audio (sound) converted too.

April 7, 2007: Since the site’s down, I’ll save a copy of the text here.

How to Convert QuickTime MOV Files

This seems to be the big issue that no one knows how to do easily. Everyone who has ever asked this on the Newsgroups will either get the age old sarcastic remark: “just buy Quicktime” or “Premiere does a great job!” And this is usually from people who pretend they actually bought the products instead of going to astalavista.box.sk and cracking them! Well dargsarnit! Who wants to buy Quicktime just to convert from its crappy uneditable format? Or spend hundreds of bucks buying Premiere for the same reason?! In that case try my method that doesn’t require illegal software or the need to shell out megabucks!

I won’t lie to you, though, there is no easy way to convert every Quicktime movie. So this is just the easiest method (other than Quicktime Pro) that I have found.
Before I start here are the things you will need:

DivX ;-) Mpeg-4 Codec 3.1alpha (or greater)
RAD Video Tools Bink

Install Bink and start it up, you will then get the following window. Select your Quicktime movie and hit the ‘convert a file’ button.

Up will appear the conversion options. First tell it where to save your final AVI file (A). Then all you need to do to start the conversion is to press ‘convert’ (E).

But there are a few other options you may wish to use before you convert. You can crop the image to a certain size (C) – it doesn’t support resizing unfortunately. If you need to resize or edit the video in any way I suggest you convert it and then do so in VirtualDub. You can also select how much of the video is to be converted (B) by selecting what frame to start the conversion from and what frame to end it. Finally we have the Audio Samplerate conversion (D). This is not really needed most of the time because it may cause synch problems if we change it from the original. The only time you may want to use it is if you intend on converting straight to VCD which requires you use a 44100Hz samplerate. But I’d prefer to prepare my audio with VirtualDub instead. Anyway, you can experiment with the rest of the settings if you find the final video doesn’t look as good as you hoped.

Once you click on the Convert button you will be asked what format you wish to convert the video into. If it is a short clip and you intend on editing it in VirtualDub, you would probably be best off using Uncompressed AVI i.e.:

If it is quite big but you still want to do lots of editing I suggest you choose MJPEG because this offers the best editing. The best quality MJPEG is the uncompressed Huffyuv format. But this sometimes has framerate problems so check your final file.

Another alternative is the PICVideo MJPEG codec which is a good trade between compression and quality.

If you don’t want to do much editing or you just want to convert straight to Divx just choose the Divx codec you like best:

After you have decided press OK and you will see the progress box below:

That’s it! The audio is always uncompressed PCM as far as I can tell, so you will need to recompress it using VirtualDub as usual. See my multiplexing guide for details of that.

Troubleshooting
The audio is out of synch, what can I do?
Make sure you are using the correct samplerate used in the original movie. Then use my AVI synching guide to put things right again.

Bink will not convert the MOV file at all?!
It is not a guarantee that Bink can convert every kind of Quicktime format (there are a few kinds). But I have tried it on a few including the best format i.e. Sorenson and it worked fine.

There is no audio, why?
Quicktime movies sometimes have copy protection installed which will disable the audio. If you have Total Recorder you can get it with that after and then multiplex it to the AVI using VirtualDub (see my multiplexing guide for details of this).

Getting the audio with Total Recorder is easy enough:

Open your video in Quicktime or Media Player depending on what plays it. Then press the red recording button at the bottom right of the picture below. It shouldn’t start recording until you play your video file. Start your video file playing.

If the format supports it, you can speed up the process using the following method: Go into Options > ‘Recording source parameters…

Choose the Software accelerated recording/converting option and also check the Max Speed option. This will speed up the conversion to many times the speed it would normally take.

When you are finished save the wave file and you are done :-)

Note: if it starts to work fine and then you get nothing but garbage for sound this is because you have a messed up cracked version of Total Recorder. You need to fully register the version of Total Recorder which requires a serial number for it to work correct. Most cracks will cause this security measure.