The free and quick way to convert MP4 to WMV (or MP4 to WMV) video files on a mac
ffmpeg will be your friend here. It’s a command line tool, but don’t be scared – just follow these steps:
Open the terminal.app found in the folder ~/Applications/Utilities and run this command:
sudo port install ffmpeg
Follow the prompts to finish the install.
*If you want to install ffmpeg with h265 support for hevc files then run the following command instead:
sudo port install ffmpeg +gpl +postproc +lame +theora +libogg +vorbis +xvid +x264 +a52 +faac +faad +dts +nonfree +x265 +libtheora
cd ~/Desktop
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -q:a 2 -q:v 2 -vcodec msmpeg4 -acodec wmav2 output.wmv
If you want to encode from WMV to MP4 then use this code:
ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -q:a 100 output.mp4
There might be a lot of text output, but hopefully (after some minutes, depending on how big your source file is) you will see something like:
frame= 2749 fps= 27 q=2.0 Lsize= 230486kB time=00:01:49.95 bitrate=17172.4kbits/s speed=1.09x video:226596kB audio:1717kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.951954%
Caution – spaces in file names need to be handled with care. Either enclose the filename in double quotation marks such as “your filename.mp4” or simply change the file name to something short and without spaces. You can always rename it when you are finished.
Tips
Change the CRF value to a higher number to reduce the quality and achieve a faster encode. Equally a lower number will provide higher quality at the cost of speed.
Automate!
You can turn this into a mac service and start encoding files using two clicks of the mouse. Just follow my 2 minute guide.
Why would you want to convert an MP4 video file to WMV?
Some corporate environments still use old versions of microsoft office that don’t support the embedding of MP4 files and so we are forced to put up with WMV. WMV has never been a good file format for the mac. There are loads of programmes that will charge you to convert mp4 to wmv on a mac, but this free and simple solution exists so you don’t have to install any crappy bloated software on your mac.
FFMPEG is a powerful media converter
The best thing about this is you now have ffmpeg installed on your mac for all your media conversion needs. ffmpeg is really powerful, so to find out more about what you can do with it, check out the ffmpeg documentation.
Stuck? Something not right?
Let me know in the comments and I might be able to help you out or point you to someone/somewhere that can.
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