What Is MOV File Format and How to Open It on Different Devices

What Is MOV

As one of the most used video container formats in video editing software, MOV file format contains videos, video effects, audio, text, pictures, subtitles, as well as other media files in a single file. The more detailed information about MOV will be talked about in this post of MiniTool.

The MOV file is a common multimedia container file format, which is developed by Apple Company. It is used in Apple’s Quicktime program as an MPEDG 4 video container file format. It is even regarded as the basis of MPEG-4 file format by Internal Organization for Standardization.

MOV files are compatible with both Mac and Windows platform. In addition, these MOV files are also compatible with Sony PSP and DVD players. MOV is ideal for editing in top video editing software such as VideoStudio Pro.

You will see MOV files on iOS devices such as iPhone and iPads, because that’s the default file format that those devices store video in. Besides, they also exist in other devices such as VideoStudio, Windows PC, Windows Media Player, etc.

What is an move file? Read here, you may have the answer in your mind now.

Open MOV Files on Different Devices

As mentioned above, MOV files exist on multiple devices. You may ask how to open MOV files on these devices? In fact, it is not hard to operate. Apple’s iTunes and QuickTime programs, VLC, Windows Media Player and Elmedia Player all can play MOV files.

However, if your Apple QuickTime Movie file has the .QT or .MOVIE file extension, you might need to utilize QuickTime unless you would like to rename the file extension to .MOV.

Alternatively, you can open MOV files on a PC through Google Drive, but you are required to upload the video to that online storage service before opening files. By doing so, you can back up these files online and stream the MOV files from any browser and enable them to be compatible with mobile device.

If you want to open MOV files on VideoStudio, you can follow the steps below.

Step 1: Launch VideoStudio.

Step 2: Select File > Open according to the on-screen navigation one by one.

Step 3: Find and right click the MOV file that you want to open among the list, and then edit and save your file.

Convert MOV Files to Other File Formats

Though MOV file format shows in multiple devices, it is not supported by all media players, devices, online file storage services and websites in fact. Hence, you need to convert it to a new format that is supported by your current player.

To convert MOV to other file formats, you need to utilize a file converter like MiniTool Movie Maker. It is powerful enough to convert MOV to GIF, MOV to MP3, etc. In general, video files are large in size, so you’d better use a video converter to reduce the space consumption of video files.

However, if your video file has a small size or you don’t care waiting for it to upload, you can convert your MOV files via online converters such as Zamzar or FileZigZag.

Final Words

MOV files are very similar to MP4 files, because both of them are lossy compression formats. That means parts of the file can be trimmed to get smaller file size. This is also the reason that they are the formats of choice for videos distributed online.

By comparison, the MP4 container format is much more common than MOV and is supported by more kinds of software and hardware devices.

If you are unable to open the file via the mentioned programs, it is likely that you are misreading the file extension. Since some file formats use file extensions that share high similarity, it is normal that you get confused. So, if you are failing to open MOV files, check the file extension again.

To sum up, this post mainly introduces what is a mov file, MOV opening method, MOV converting method and tools.