100% local — your file never leaves your browser
MOV to Text
Turn a QuickTime MOV into text for free — including the ones straight off an iPhone, right in the browser.
- Free
- No sign-up
- No watermark
How it works
- 01
Choose the MOV
Pick it from your device or drag it onto the page. iPhone recordings work as they are — no need to export or convert anything first.
- 02
Transcribe on your device
Pick the spoken language and press Transcribe. The first run downloads the speech model once; after that it is cached and starts immediately.
- 03
Copy or export
Copy the text, or download TXT. Export SRT or VTT instead when the timings need to go back onto the video.
Why choose TranscriptSnap
MOV works on a phone here
This is the one thing most browser-based tools get wrong. A MOV that a phone refuses to open elsewhere opens here, because the audio track is lifted out of the QuickTime container before anything tries to decode it.
The video is never decoded
Only the audio track is read, so ProRes, HEVC or H.264 makes no difference, and neither does resolution. A 4K iPhone clip and a small export of the same footage produce identical text.
Big files stop being a problem
MOV files are large because the picture is large — and the picture is exactly the part that is skipped. A multi-gigabyte recording is read off your disk a piece at a time rather than loaded whole.
Nothing is uploaded
Phone recordings are usually of real people — a meeting, an interview, a family video. Processing happens in this tab, so no copy of the file lands anywhere else.
Good to know
Why MOV fails on phones almost everywhere else
MOV is QuickTime, Apple’s own container, and it is what an iPhone writes when it records video. The audio inside is ordinarily plain AAC — the same thing an MP4 carries — but QuickTime describes that audio differently in the file’s index, using an older layout with a few extra fields that MP4 does not use. Safari on iOS reads only the MP4 layout, so it rejects the file before reaching the audio at all, and the tool built on top of it reports a generic failure. Nothing is wrong with the recording; the same file opens without complaint on a desktop browser. The fix is to lift the audio track out and re-describe it the way MP4 does, which is what happens here before decoding starts.
What an iPhone actually records
Video from the Camera app is HEVC or H.264 with an AAC audio track, wrapped in MOV. Screen recordings are the same. The picture format is what the storage settings change, and it has no bearing on transcription, because none of the picture is decoded. What does matter is the microphone: a phone held near the speaker produces clean audio and an accurate transcript, while a phone left on a table across a room produces the hardest case there is, no matter which tool reads it.
MOV and MP4 are closer than they look
MP4 was derived from QuickTime, which is why the two behave almost identically and why converting between them is quick — the audio is usually copied across untouched rather than re-encoded. That also means converting a MOV to MP4 before transcribing gains you nothing in accuracy: the same audio track is being read either way. The only reason anyone does it is to get around tools that cannot open MOV, which is the reason this page exists. Converting an MP4 to text instead
When a MOV still will not open
A small number of MOV files carry something other than AAC — uncompressed PCM from a screen-capture utility, or a codec from an editing workflow. Those fall back to the browser’s own decoder, which may or may not handle them. A file with no audio track at all produces an empty transcript rather than an error, so a silent-looking result is worth checking against the recording first. If a file genuinely refuses to load, exporting a standard MP4 from any editor fixes it, and since only the audio is used you lose nothing in the round trip.
Nothing is uploaded, and you can check
The speech model runs inside this browser tab, so the MOV never reaches a server. That is the difference that matters for recordings of meetings, clients or family — not a promise about how a company treats files it receives, but the fact that it does not receive them. The check takes thirty seconds: open the network panel before transcribing, or disconnect from the network once the model has cached and try anyway. Why browser-based transcription keeps recordings off other servers
Subtitles back onto the clip
Most MOV files people transcribe are footage rather than audio, so the transcript often needs to return to the timeline. SRT and VTT exports carry the timings and drop straight into Final Cut, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve or a social platform’s caption uploader. Read them once before publishing: names and technical terms are where a speech model is most likely to be confidently wrong, and those are also the words a viewer notices. Generating subtitles from a video file
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a MOV to text?
Choose the MOV above, pick the spoken language and press Transcribe. The text appears below, ready to copy or export as TXT, SRT or VTT.
Does this work on an iPhone?
Yes. The audio track is lifted out of the QuickTime container first, which is the step that lets iOS Safari decode it — MOV files that fail in other browser tools on a phone work here.
Do I need to convert my MOV to MP4 first?
No, and it would not improve accuracy if you did. Converting normally copies the same audio track across untouched, so the transcript comes out the same either way.
Is my MOV uploaded to a server?
No. It is read from disk by your browser and processed in the same tab. You can confirm it in the browser network panel.
Is there a file size limit?
No imposed limit. Only the audio track is read, so the video — which is nearly all of the file — never has to be loaded. Very long recordings are bounded by your device’s memory instead.
Does HEVC or ProRes make a difference?
No. Those describe the picture, and none of the picture is decoded. Only the audio track is opened, so any video codec inside a MOV behaves the same.
My MOV produced an empty transcript. Why?
Most often the file has no audio track, or the track is silent. Play it with the volume up to check before trying anything else.
Can I get timestamps?
Yes. The plain TXT export is continuous text; SRT and VTT both carry timestamps and drop straight into a video editor.
Convert MOV to text without uploading the recording
MOV is what an iPhone writes every time it records, which makes it one of the most common formats people need as text — and one of the most awkward, because a great many web tools cannot open it on the device it was recorded on. The obstacle is not the audio but the container: QuickTime indexes its audio track in a layout that mobile browsers decline to read. Lifting that track out and handing it over in the layout they do read removes the problem entirely, and it happens on your own device, so the recording never leaves it. What comes back is plain text for reading and searching, or SRT and VTT when the words need to go back onto the footage.