Video Converter for Android: free and unlimited

What the Android app does

Video Converter for Android converts between MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV and 3GP on the phone itself, with no account and no upload. You pick a clip from the gallery or from Files, choose the output format, choose Low, Medium or High, and press Convert. The result goes to the system share sheet and is kept in a History tab, so last week's file can be shared again without converting it twice.

On Android every conversion is free and unlimited. There is no counter, no trial and no purchase in the Android build - the honest difference from the iPhone version, covered further down this page.

What the app does better than this website

The converter on the rest of this site is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running single-threaded inside your browser tab. That is excellent for rewrapping a file and only adequate for re-encoding one: roughly real time at 720p, slower at 1080p, worse again for H.265 or VP9. The app hands the frames to MediaCodec, the dedicated encoding block in your phone's chip, which is built for exactly this and does not care how long the clip is. On a 4K holiday video the gap is not a few per cent, it is a different order of magnitude.

The app also has no 2 GB ceiling. The browser build addresses memory with a 32-bit heap, so it refuses files above 2 GB outright and warns you past about 300 MB, because a conversion needs roughly three times the file size in free memory. The app streams from storage instead, so the only limit is how much free space the phone has.

Three smaller things matter more in practice than they sound: it reads your camera roll directly, so there is no "find the file" step; it finishes into the Android share sheet, so the clip reaches WhatsApp or Drive in one tap; and it works with no tab open and no network at all.

What this website does better than the app

The big one is stream copy. The app always re-encodes: even MOV to MP4, where the file almost always already holds H.264 and AAC and the two containers are close cousins, is decoded and encoded again at the preset bitrate. The browser tool checks the codecs first and, when they are already legal in the container you asked for, copies the streams across untouched. That is seconds instead of minutes, and the picture is bit-for-bit identical rather than merely close. The same applies to MKV to MP4 and to TS, MTS and M2TS files.

The app has no WebM in either direction, no resolution or frame-rate control, and no constant-quality mode - it sets a bitrate and lets the hardware hit it. It also shows you only the file name and size, where the browser converter reads the header and tells you the video codec and profile, resolution, frame rate, duration, audio codec and overall bitrate before you commit to anything. If your actual question is "what is inside this file and why will nothing play it", start with the HEVC to H.264 page or the guide on checking a video codec without installing anything.

What the three quality presets really do

Low, Medium and High are video bitrates: 1 Mb/s, 2.5 Mb/s and 5 Mb/s, with audio re-encoded to AAC at 128 kb/s every time. Medium is the default and is a sensible target for phone footage; High is for material you still want to edit or upload later. Because these are bitrates rather than a quality target, a simple scene gets the same allowance as a busy one: that is the trade for hardware speed.

Two further notes: AVI output uses the MPEG-4 Part 2 encoder rather than H.264, which is what old AVI players expect, and if MediaCodec refuses an unusual file the app falls back to a slower software encoder.

One limit the app and the browser tool share: only the first video track and the first audio track survive, and subtitle tracks are dropped. A multi-language MKV comes out with one soundtrack and no subtitles. If those tracks matter, keep the file as an MKV - see getting an MKV onto a smart TV for when that is the better move.

What it costs on Android, and why iPhone differs

On Android the app is free and unlimited. Convert one file or a hundred; the build ships without a purchase.

On iPhone it is not the same deal, and pretending otherwise would be a lie you would discover in about five minutes. There, the first conversion is free and further conversions need the paid upgrade. That is the honest summary of the iPhone version. The converter on this website is free on every platform including iOS, with no daily limit and no account, for files up to 2 GB, which is a real answer if you would rather not pay.

Nothing leaves the phone

The whole pipeline is FFmpeg running locally on the device: no account, no server leg, no network call, which is why it works in aeroplane mode. The Android build asks for your photo library and nothing else - camera, microphone and storage permissions are blocked in the manifest. A file that is never sent anywhere cannot be retained or leaked in someone else's breach, which is the same architectural argument the browser tool makes.

A rule of thumb

If the job is a container swap - a MOV, an MKV or a camcorder TS file that needs to become an MP4 - use the browser tool, because a stream copy is faster and lossless and the app cannot do it. If it is long or 4K footage that genuinely needs re-encoding, or the video is already sitting in your gallery, install the app and let the hardware work. And if you are here because an iPhone video will not open on your phone, the guide on that exact problem explains what is actually wrong first: usually HEVC rather than the MOV wrapper.