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I downloaded the photos & video clips from my recent trip onto an external hd, I can open all photos but not the video clips with the xtension.mov. None of the players I have tried work. Can these .mov files be converted to another format?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13
First, you need to know a .mov file is not really just one type of file. A .mov file is a container of audio and video streams that can be encoded in a variety of ways. Some of them may not work in Quicktime Player even though that is usually what tries to play them.
To make sure the files actually contain valid video, you might try a different program to play them. VLC is a free program that is kind of the Swiss army knife of video players. It will play almost anything.
Next, you may want to convert them. VLC has some capabilities in this regard but there is another program that is even better that is called Handbrake. I will warn that it has a bit of a learning curve, but it is a rather versatile transcoding tool for converting videos into different formats.
I can tell you more about them if this sounds like something you want to pursue.
First, you need to know a .mov file is not really just one type of file. A .mov file is a container of audio and video streams that can be encoded in a variety of ways. Some of them may not work in Quicktime Player even though that is usually what tries to play them.
To make sure the files actually contain valid video, you might try a different program to play them. VLC is a free program that is kind of the Swiss army knife of video players. It will play almost anything.
Next, you may want to convert them. VLC has some capabilities in this regard but there is another program that is even better that is called Handbrake. I will warn that it has a bit of a learning curve, but it is a rather versatile transcoding tool for converting videos into different formats.
I can tell you more about them if this sounds like something you want to pursue.
Hi Phillip, actually, the whole thing is weird. Basically all my movie clips play back for me and as a rule, I use VLC. These particular files/photos/movie clips were originally saved on my Mac when I was using Apples Aperture as my photo editing software. You may know what happened with Aperture. My entire photo library (28,000 images) moved from Aperture to Photos. Now these 800+ photos and video clips from our Portugal trip reside in Apples Photo App. The photos open up all right but not the video clips. The message says plainly, these images can’t be played back, period. I can see all the clips on the screen, but just the start, the first image but that’s all. It even tells me even how long the clip is. Apple is of little help, they no longer support anything related to their program called Aperture.
Open the videos in VLC or Quicktime Player and see what codec they used. Maybe they used something like Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) which isn't supported in Photos or Quicktime (and I'm not sure how you would have even gotten them into Photos). If you don't have the originals laying around in your file system, you can export the originals from Photos to open them in one of those other apps.
If it is an unsupported codec like AIC or ProRes, you're going to need to transcode/convert them if you want them in Photos. This will result in a generational loss of quality directly related to whatever combination of codec and bitrate that you choose, but that may not matter to you.
Thanks again, I will give it another try. I’m quite sure something corrupted when migrating this particular file from the Aperture Program to Photos. I moved them in batches over a period of a week. All the other video files work, just this one with about 30 clips won’t. I will play around with it next week. I will keep you posted.
Hans
unable to open .mov files
