Recently, I switched to the Apple ecosystem of devices almost entirely and transitioned all my data into iCloud for ease of usage. The main issue I encountered was that not all popular video formats are supported. It could have been a better experience moving years of photos and videos to the service. (But it’s not, haha!)
The common Apple way to solve it is to buy a fancy video converter just for 95.99$ (only today). But why would we do it when we already have everything in the console? Let’s go.
Prepare
FFmpeg is a powerful command-line tool to manipulate video and audio files easily. On macOS, you can get it using Homebrew.
brew install ffmpegCopy to another container
A video file is like a box with goodies. But if it is only the box that iCloud dislikes, you can move the video and audio information without any encoding:
ffmpeg -i VIDEO_00001.mkv -c copy 1.mov-i VIDEO_00001.mkvspecifies the input file-c copytells ffmpeg to copy both audio and video data without encoding it into something else1.movis the name of the resulting file
Encode video but copy audio
ffmpeg -i VIDEO_00001.mkv -c:v libx264 -profile:v main -level 3.1 -preset medium -crf 23 -x264-params ref=4 -c:a copy 1.mov-i VIDEO_00001.mkvspecifies the input file-c:v libx264specifies the video codec to use, H.264 is a good one for our needs-profile:v main -level 3.1 -preset medium -crf 23 -x264-params ref=4are settings for video codec suitable for a decent quality-c:a copytells to copy audio codec without encoding
Encode audio but copy video
ffmpeg -i VIDEO_00001.mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac 1.mov-i VIDEO_00001.mkvspecifies the input file-c:v copytells to copy video codec without encoding-c:a aacspecifies the audio codec to use
Encode in a batch
for f in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c copy "${f%.mkv}.mov"; doneThis snippet will find all *.mkv files in a given directory and convert them to mov of the same name using the -c copy strategy. You can change it to what suits your needs.
