Convert MOV to MP3

Getting iPhone videos onto a Windows PC

Connect the iPhone with its cable, unlock it and tap Trust on the phone. It then shows up in File Explorer as Apple iPhone, with its photos and videos under Internal Storage, in the DCIM folder. The videos are the .MOV files there; copy them, or the whole folder, to your PC. The Windows Photos app's Import does the same in fewer clicks, and iCloud for Windows can download them too.

From there, drop the folder on Octoolo. It reaches three folders down and keeps only the video and sound files, up to 500 at once, so the photos sitting beside them cause no trouble. Each clip shows a frame and its length, which makes the one with the speech easy to find. A clip you do not want is removed from the list with its x button before you convert.

HEVC videos, no extension needed

iPhones record in HEVC (H.265) when Settings, Camera, Formats is on High Efficiency, and in H.264 when it is on Most Compatible. Windows needs Microsoft's HEVC Video Extensions to play HEVC, and without them a MOV may open with sound but no picture, or not at all.

None of that matters here. Octoolo reads the file with FFmpeg, which handles HEVC by itself, and to save the sound it does not decode the picture in the first place. Even the frame shown beside each clip in the list is drawn by FFmpeg, so HEVC clips look like any others there. An iPhone video's sound is usually AAC, which an MP3 cannot hold as it is, so Octoolo encodes it once, at the bit rate you choose.

Voices, music and noisy rooms

What you filmed decides the setting more than the file does:

• Speech, such as a toast, an interview or a class: Small (128 kbps) is plenty.
• Music, such as a concert, a recital or a band practice: High (320 kbps) keeps the most of what the phone heard.
• A mix of both, like a party where people talk over music: Balanced (192 kbps) is a fair middle.
• Not sure: As it is follows each clip's own sound, between 128 and 320 kbps.

Phone recordings are often quiet or noisy. Once you have the MP3, the Audio Editor can make it louder, even out its loudness or reduce background noise, and the MP3 cutter trims the chatter before and after. Several clips from one evening can become one file with the audio joiner.

MP3, or keep it for Apple

MP3 is the choice when the sound has to play everywhere: car stereos, Android phones, old players, web forms that list MP3 only. If it is going back to an iPhone or into Apple Music, M4A is the gentler choice. Pick M4A instead of MP3 and, with As it is, Octoolo copies the iPhone's AAC sound into it without encoding it again.

Whichever you pick, the files stay easy to match up: each one is named after its clip, so IMG_0457.mp3 sits beside IMG_0457.MOV. To gather them in one place instead, switch Save in over to A folder I choose… before converting.

And if you want the whole video as a file any Windows PC plays without extensions, HEVC to MP4 turns the picture into H.264, while MOV to MP4 covers MOV files of every kind.