FLV to MOV Converter

Convert FLV to MOV Online

FLV is a dead end for playback — Adobe ended Flash Player support on December 31, 2020, and no current browser or editor will open one. Converting an old Flash Video clip to MOV re-encodes it into Apple's QuickTime container with an H.264 video track and AAC audio, which is exactly what QuickTime Player, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Premiere expect to be handed. Upload the FLV, confirm the codec and quality, and download an edit-ready MOV.

How to Convert FLV to MOV

1. Upload Your FLV File: Drag and drop your .flv onto the page or click "Add Files" to browse. Several clips can be queued and converted in one batch using the same settings.
2. Confirm the Video Codec and Audio Codec: Open Advanced Options. Video Codec defaults to H.264, the right answer for QuickTime and editor compatibility; H.265 is there if your target application decodes it, and MPEG-4 and MJPEG are the other safe MOV choices. Audio Codec defaults to AAC, with AC3, MP3 and several PCM variants also available.
3. Set Quality, Resolution, or Trim (Optional): Under File Compression, Quality Preset starts on "Very High (Recommended)"; Specific file size, Constant Bitrate, Variable Bitrate, Constant Quality, and Constraint Quality are there if you need a hard ceiling. Video resolution starts on "Keep original" and also offers a percentage, a preset from 144p to 4320p, or an exact Width x Height. Trim takes a start time and duration.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save your MOV. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

FLV vs MOV: What Changes in the Conversion

How the Quality Preset Maps to H.264

With H.264 selected, the Quality Preset is a constant-quality target rather than a bitrate target — the encoder spends whatever bits a scene needs to hold the chosen quality level, so a static screencast comes out far smaller than an action clip at the same setting. The values below are calibrated at 1080p and shift by up to two steps in either direction for materially smaller or larger frames.

Most Flash-era FLVs were encoded at modest bitrates for streaming, so there is rarely anything to gain from Highest — the source is the ceiling, and the higher settings simply spend bits preserving the original's compression artifacts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will converting FLV to MOV improve the video quality?

No, and nothing can. Most FLV files were encoded with Sorenson Spark or On2 VP6 at bitrates chosen for early-2000s streaming, so the detail that was thrown away at capture time is simply gone. What the conversion does is put whatever survives into a modern, editable wrapper with an H.264 track, which is a compatibility win rather than a quality one. Choosing a larger resolution preset scales the frame up but invents no new detail, so an old 320x240 clip stretched to 1080p just looks soft and larger.

Why won't my FLV open in QuickTime Player or Final Cut Pro?

Apple's applications never natively supported the FLV container — playback always depended on Adobe's Flash runtime or a third-party plug-in, and that path disappeared when Flash Player reached end-of-life on December 31, 2020. Final Cut Pro in particular only ingests formats it can decode directly. Converting to MOV with an H.264 video track and AAC audio gives Apple's apps a container and a pair of codecs they handle natively, which is the entire point of this conversion.

Does the MOV keep the audio from my FLV?

Yes. Our default pairing for MOV output is H.264 video with AAC audio, so the sound is decoded and re-encoded to AAC — the standard companion to H.264 in a QuickTime file — and stays in sync for every editor that opens it. FLV files most often carried MP3 or AAC to begin with, so this is a routine transcode. If the recording used Nellymoser Asao — Flash's microphone codec — it converts fine but will still sound thin, because that is how it was captured.

Should I convert FLV to MOV or to MP4?

Pick MOV when the destination is Apple's editing ecosystem: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Compressor, and QuickTime treat it as a first-class format and import it without a transcode step. Pick MP4 when the file needs to play everywhere — phones, browsers, smart TVs, Windows. The two share the same underlying structure and can carry the same H.264 video, so the choice is about which ecosystem you are handing the file to, not about quality. For the wider-compatibility route, use FLV to MP4.

The Video Codec list offers Theora, WMV, and HuffYUV — should I use any of those?

No. The dropdown is shared across video targets, so it shows more codecs than a QuickTime file sensibly carries. For MOV, stay with H.264 (the default), or H.265 if your application decodes it; MPEG-4 and MJPEG are the other reasonable choices, with MJPEG occasionally useful when an older editing system wants intra-frame footage. Putting Theora, WMV, or a Flash-era codec inside a .mov produces a file Apple's applications are unlikely to open, which defeats the reason for converting.

How big will the MOV be compared to the original FLV?

Usually larger, sometimes considerably. Flash video was tuned to be small for early-2000s streaming bandwidth, while the default Very High preset targets near-transparent quality and will happily spend more bits than the source ever used to preserve what is there. If size matters more than fidelity, drop the Quality Preset to Medium, or switch File Compression to Specific file size and name a target in megabytes. You can also run the finished file through the video compressor afterward.

Can I crop the clip down to one section during the conversion?

You can trim it in time, yes — set Trim to Time Range and enter a start point and a duration in seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss, and only that span is encoded, which also shortens the job on a long capture. Trimming is a time operation, not a spatial one, so it will not change the frame's borders; to change the picture dimensions use the Video resolution controls or an exact Width x Height. If cutting is the whole job and you are not changing format, the video cutter handles FLV and MOV directly.

My old FLV is partly corrupted — will it still convert?

Often, partially. Files pulled from old streaming caches were frequently cut off mid-download, leaving a broken index and a truncated stream. The decoder generally reads up to the last complete frame and the conversion produces a shorter but valid MOV, which is usually better than nothing. Nothing can reconstruct data that was never written to disk, so if the result stops early, the missing footage was already missing before you started.

Should I change the resolution, or leave it on Keep original?

Leave it on Keep original unless you have a specific reason. Most Flash-era video sits somewhere between 320x240 and 854x480, and upscaling it to a preset like 1080p only produces a bigger file that looks softer, because the scaler is interpolating pixels rather than recovering detail. Downscaling is worth doing when you want a smaller file, and setting an exact Width x Height is worth doing when an editing timeline expects one specific frame size.

How are my files handled, and how long are they kept?

Your FLV is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. On a long video the practical constraint is upload size and connection speed rather than the conversion itself, so trimming a large capture before uploading saves real time.