DaVinci Resolve imports MP4 as audio only: why, and the fix

Free DaVinci Resolve on Windows has no licence to decode H.265/HEVC, so an HEVC MP4 arrives in the media pool as a waveform with no picture: the audio stream imports, the video stream is silently dropped. Ten-bit H.264 is widely reported to fail the same way. Transcoding the clip to 8-bit H.264 in an MP4 is the correct free fix.

On macOS the same file usually imports, because the operating system supplies the decoder Resolve free is missing on Windows. Before you change anything, find out which codec is actually inside your file.

Check the codec before you try anything

Every long forum thread about this starts the same way: twenty replies spent guessing what is inside the file. You can settle it in a second. Drop the clip into our HEVC to H.264 converter and it reads the header in your browser — the file is never uploaded — then prints the container, the video codec, the codec profile, the resolution, the frame rate and the audio codec. You do not have to convert anything to see that readout. If you would rather use a general reader, the guide on checking a video's codec online covers the same ground and what each field means.

Then match what you see against this:

If you run ffprobe or MediaInfo instead, the same information appears as the pixel format. yuv420p is 8-bit and fine; yuv420p10le or yuv422p10le is 10-bit and suspect.

Why only the video stream fails

An MP4 is a container. It holds a video stream and an audio stream side by side, each in its own codec, with an index describing where every frame sits. Resolve can always parse the container — that is just structure — and it has its own AAC decoder, so the audio track appears immediately with a proper waveform.

The video stream is a separate question. Decoding HEVC requires a patent licence that Blackmagic pays for per seat, and on Windows the operating system does not hand out a system-wide HEVC decoder the way macOS does. So HEVC decoding lives in Resolve Studio, the paid version. The free build on Windows opens your file, reads the container, finds a video stream it is not licensed to touch, and carries on with what is left. Depending on the version you may see the clip marked as offline, or a thumbnail that never resolves, or simply a sound file with a duration. Resolve does not put a dialog on screen explaining any of this, which is exactly why the search that brought you here exists.

The other causes that look identical

10-bit and 4:2:2 footage from a mirrorless camera

Recent Sony, Panasonic, Canon and Fujifilm bodies record 4:2:2 10-bit by default in their better modes, often as H.265 but sometimes as H.264. The extra colour precision is genuinely useful when you grade, and it is also the thing the free version refuses. The free build is also capped at 8-bit when it exports H.264 or H.265, so even a successful import will not preserve 10-bit all the way through on a free licence.

Variable frame rate

Phone recordings, screen captures and anything from OBS often carry a variable frame rate. Resolve assumes constant frame rate throughout. The clip may import and look fine, then drift out of sync minutes into the timeline, or produce duplicated and dropped frames when you scrub. If your readout shows an odd frame rate like 29.87 or 59.94 on a screen recording, read the guide on converting variable frame rate to constant frame rate before you cut anything — converting to a fixed 30 or 60 fps at the same time as the codec change costs nothing extra.

The file is not the MP4 it says it is

A file renamed from .mkv to .mp4 keeps its Matroska structure and Resolve will not be fooled. Neither will Premiere, for the same reason described in the guide on Premiere Pro refusing MKV files. A genuine remux with our MKV to MP4 converter rebuilds the container properly and, where the codec is already legal in MP4, copies the streams untouched.

Picture imports but the audio does not

That is the mirror-image problem and it has a different cause — usually AC-3 or another codec on the audio side. The guide on video that plays with no sound covers it.

Convert to 8-bit H.264 and import again

H.264 in an MP4, 8-bit 4:2:0, is the format free Resolve is happiest with on every platform. Our HEVC to H.264 converter runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside the tab, so the file stays on your machine — which matters if the footage belongs to a client. Settings worth changing:

Two honest points about that conversion. It is a re-encode, not a copy, so it is not lossless — HEVC and H.264 are different codecs and there is no way to change one into the other without decoding and re-compressing. And the browser build is single-threaded, so it is slow: think roughly real-time for 720p and slower than real-time for 1080p, depending on your machine. Files above 2 GB are refused outright, because a 32-bit WebAssembly heap cannot address them, and above roughly 300 MB the page warns you that it needs around three times the file size in free memory.

When H.264 is the wrong target

If you are grading properly — pushing a log profile around, recovering highlights, working with 10-bit source — the right intermediate is ProRes or DNxHR, not H.264. Those codecs are lightly compressed, decode cheaply on every frame, and hold 10-bit. Our converter does not output them: it writes MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI and 3GP, and its encoders are H.264, H.265, VP9, MPEG-4 Part 2 and the usual audio codecs. Nothing more.

So be clear about what you are doing. Converting to H.264 gets a broken clip into the timeline and keeps a cut moving. If the project is a grade rather than a cut, transcode to DNxHR HQ with a desktop tool and accept the disk space. Re-encoding 10-bit HEVC into 8-bit H.264 throws away the colour precision you would otherwise be grading with, and no quality slider brings it back.

The paid routes, and when they are worth it

There are two ways to make Resolve read HEVC without converting anything. The first is Microsoft's HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store, a small paid add-on that installs a system HEVC decoder; reboot afterwards. It is the same add-on that fixes HEVC playback elsewhere in Windows, described in the guide on HEVC video that will not play on Windows 11. Results inside Resolve vary by version, so treat it as worth trying rather than guaranteed.

The second is Resolve Studio, a one-off licence that includes HEVC decoding, hardware-accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode and encode on supported GPUs, and export above 4K. If you work with HEVC every week, that is the real answer and converting every clip by hand is not.

If the footage is on your phone

iPhones record HEVC by default, which is why so many of these threads start with "the clip came off my phone". If the file has not reached your computer yet, converting it on the phone saves a step and avoids the browser's size limits entirely. Our Video Converter app for iPhone and the Android version use the device's own hardware encoder, so they are far quicker than any browser on long or 4K footage and have no file-size ceiling. Get them from the App Store or Google Play.

Two caveats, stated plainly. The app always re-encodes — it has no stream-copy mode — and it shows you the file name and size but not the codec, so the diagnostic step still belongs in the browser. On iPhone the first conversion is free and further conversions need the paid upgrade; on Android it is free and unlimited.