Quicktime Player 10 lets you convert a movie created with a mobile phone (3GPP format) to MPEG-4... For Free!
UPDATE: Just simply change the file extension from .3gp to .m4v and you’re done. Thanks Jason for the great tip!
Eureka!
This is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, but just couldn’t found out how… until today!
And I thought, I’ll share it here as after all these years, I haven’t found anything on the Web to help me do this. Which by the way, I found out by pure luck.
The problem. All the latest mobile phones I had (from a Motorola Razr to the Google Nexus I’m trying out now) can record videos using the 3GPP format.
But, inexplicably so, Apple’s iMovie (I’m using the latest version 8.0.5) would not recognise nor import those mobile movies.
My solution. So to import a 3GPP movie into iMovie, I would first convert it, using the free Quicktime Player (i’m using version 10.0), to MPEG-4 (with the .M4V file extension). And then, import it into iMovie.
Here’s how I did it:
- Open the 3GPP movie in Quicktime Player: File -> Open File
- Share it with iTunes: Share -> iTunes
- Choose the Apple TV size (better quality but larger file size) and click Share
- Quicktime Player will add the .M4V extension to the original name of the file
- After the file appears in iTunes, you can import it using iMovie.
It’s not as straightforward as if it was possible to import a mobile phone video directly into iMovie, but it does the job. Moreover, it’s free!
Posted by TechPulse 360 
