For example, if you intend to post the video online, it is best to tick the “Web optimized” box. At this point, you can just press “Start” and the video will be converted to an MP4 file and stored in your “Videos” directory.Īlthough HandBrake’s defaults are good, there are some options which you might want to check and/or change before proceeding with the video conversion. HandBrake will parse the video file and display a summary about it. To add the PPA use:Ĭlick “Source” and use the open file dialog box to find the video file you want to convert.

The best way to get the software is by adding the author’s Personal Package Archive (PPA) to your system and installing from there. Here is a step by step guide to converting a video file (in this case a 3GP file from a smartphone video recording) to MP4 using HandBrake on Linux. HandBrake is designed to create MP4 files with H.264 video and AAC audio. It can actually hold several different types of MPEG encoded video, but in general, an MP4 file is expected to contain video compressed using the H.264 video codec and audio compressed using AAC, MP3 or possibly AC3. The MP4 file format is the standard container for video and audio files encoded using the MPEG-4 standards. For example, the Matroska (MKV) file format is not limited to any codec and can hold virtually anything. Some file formats can hold almost any type of video and audio regardless of how it is encoded. It in turn contains (holds) the video, audio and subtitles (if present).

There is the file format itself this is known as the container. A file format like MP4 is actually made up of several components. Video file formats can be a bit confusing as there is more to a video file than just the video data.

Convert mkv to mp4 handbrake