QuickTime Player Creates .mov Files
Every time I do a screen recording, I have to go trough the hassle of converting the video to MP4 on my Apple computer.
Even my iPhone can export to MP4 so I there is no reason for it not to work on my computer.
In my experience, at least, recent versions of QuickTime Player name the file with .mov but use the H.264 format, so you can just rename the file with .mp4 without having to re-encode it. But the .mov default creates all manner of problems for people who don’t know this, e.g. when using apps and Web sites that require MP4 files and only know how to look at the filename.
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My understanding is like yours: mov and mp4 (which are container formats) are extremely similar (the mp4 standard was based on the mov format).
I wouldn’t recommend just renaming the files. The QuickTime and MP4 container formats are similar (MP4 is based on QuickTime) but not identical. There is no assurance that a renamed QuickTime file is going to work in all places that support MP4. A better solution would be to use an app like Subler (https://subler.org) to dump your audio and video tracks into an MP4 container. This gets you a standards-compliant container and does not require any re-encoding, so it’s extremely fast and there is no quality loss.