How to Upload MOV Video to YouTube without Errors

Updated Sep 12,2018 | by Cody

Technically, Mov is one of the supported YouTube file formats, but you may still receive invalid file format error when you upload MOV video to YouTube. Read on to see why did that happen and how you can fix it.

YouTube supports many video file formats including MOV, MP4, AVI, WMV, FLV, 3GPP, HEVC, WebM, etc. However, some MOV videos’ file type may not be accepted by YouTube because of the encoding rate or other factors.

After running many tests, I found that short MOV videos can be uploaded to YouTube successfully. I tried MOV videos from QuickTime recording and DVDs. It is unable to upload long MOV videos to YouTube.

With this figured out, the solutions are clear. You can either convert MOV to MP4 or another format that YouTube handles better or split the video into several smaller parts.

In order to convert your MOV video fast, you can use a dedicated Windows desktop program IOTransfer that allows you to convert MOV video to many other formats including audio formats.

If you are an iOS user, then you really should not miss it because IOTransfer also allows you to one click transfer video to your iPhone. let’s see how it works in the steps below.

Step 1. Free download and install this software on your Windows PC.

Step 2. Within this program, click on the VIDEO tab at the top menu and then click the Converter button from the left side menu.

Step 3. Click Add Files to add one or more MOV video files that you want to convert.

Step 4. Click the Output Format and select your preferred video format from the drop-down menu.

Step 5. Click Convert Now to start the video conversion. If you have an iPhone connected to this PC, you can check the option Automatically transfer the converted video into your iOS device.

After that, you should be able to upload this video to YouTube effortlessly. If you want to watch MOV video on your iPhone or iPad, this tool can also help you do exactly that. 

Another option will be using a free online tool. Since it is a web-based tool, it is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS users. what’s amazing about this online video converter tool is that it can also cut videos and change many other video parameters.

Step 1. Head over to https://video.online-convert.com/convert-to-mp4 If you need another video format rather than MP4, you can select it from the left menu.

Step 2. Click Choose file to upload your video. If the MOV video is not saved locally, you can also add the video URL.

Step 3. While uploading, configure the video settings including quality, bitrate, audio codec, video start/end time, etc.

Step 4. Click Convert file to start to convert MOV for YouTube.

If you use QuickTime to record the MOV video, you can also use QuickTime to simply split this video in order to upload to YouTube. You can refer to the following steps to get started.

Step 1. Play the MOV video that you want to Split with QuickTime.

Step 2. Go to the point in the timeline where you want to split, and then click Edit > Split Clip.

Step 3. Click Done to split this video.

If you want to split one video into multiple parts, then you just repeat these steps. Of course, you can also use other free video editing software to split video. 

All these three methods can help you successfully upload MOV to YouTube. You can choose one that suits you. Which method do you want to try first to solve this problem or do you have a better solution? Share your thoughts in the comments section to help others.

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