WMV to MP4 Converter

Think of WMV as that stubborn friend who insists on meeting only at their favorite diner. Sure, Windows Media Video plays nicely on Windows (and will even crash Mac parties if you install Windows Media Player), but outside its comfort zone? Not so much. We put the most popular conversion tricks through their paces to see which ones actually get WMV to mingle with MP4 – and which are all talk. Spoiler: we got hands-on with every method you’ll see below, so you’re getting real results, not just theory.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to convert WMV to MP4 using Movavi Video Converter, break down how the two formats compare, and answer the questions you didn’t know you had about getting your videos ready to play anywhere.

I’ve tested pretty much every trick in the book – online converters, clunky freeware, you name it – and I keep coming back to Movavi Video Converter. In my own run-throughs I tossed in everything from tiny clips to giant multi-gig WMV files, and it handled them all without a single hiccup. The screenshots you’ll see in this guide come straight from those tests, so you know this is the real deal.

Movavi’s desktop app (available for both Windows and Mac) supports over 180 formats, batch processing, and even lossless conversion for pristine quality. Here’s exactly how I go from WMV headache to MP4 bliss.

WMV and MP4 are both popular video formats but let’s see what makes them different from each other.

WMV (Windows Media Video) is a video container format developed by Microsoft. Today it’s seen as a rather old-fashioned format which is best suited for use on Windows; other operating systems may experience problems playing this video format. Its codecs and compression algorithms are less technologically advanced than those of MP4, which primarily uses H.264 and H.265 codecs.

MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a container format used for storing video and audio streams. This format provides high compression levels and relatively low quality loss, which makes it one of the most widely used formats on the internet. Over the course of time, MP4 has become a truly universal format and can be played on almost any desktop or portable device.

So, in the end, there is one main point that you should focus on when deciding which of the two formats to use – the operating system. If you want to play your WMV videos only on a Windows system, it’s fine to keep your files the way they are without conversion. But if you’re thinking of playing them on other platforms or mobile devices, then converting WMV to the more advanced MP4 format is the better solution.