avi → mp4
AVI to MP4, for footage older than streaming
AVI comes from 1992 and support for it has quietly been dropped almost everywhere. The video inside is usually fine — it just needs a wrapper that current devices still recognise.
Processed on your own hardware · never transmitted, never stored
What happens when you drop a file in
The file stays put. Your browser opens it the same way an image viewer would. There is no transfer, which is why there is no upload bar to watch.
An encoder arrives once. The first job on this site pulls down a compiled build of FFmpeg, roughly 30 MB. It is kept afterwards, so every job after the first starts immediately.
Your own hardware does the job. The work happens in this tab, on your processor. A laptop from the last few years handles short clips in well under real time.
The result lands in Downloads. Assembled in memory and handed straight to your browser. Close the tab and every trace of it is gone.
Why these files stopped opening
Microsoft designed AVI before streaming, before phones, before hardware video decoding existed. It has no real provision for modern codecs, no sane handling of variable frame rates, and none of the metadata that current players expect to find.
Support did not disappear in one dramatic moment; it eroded. Each generation of software dropped it a little further until a format that once ran everywhere now opens reliably in almost nothing except VLC.
None of that damages what is inside. Camcorder tapes, captures from early screen recording software, archived family footage — the pictures are intact and only the packaging has expired.
Expect this one to take real time
Unlike MOV or MKV, an AVI almost never contains H.264, so its contents cannot simply be moved into a new wrapper. The video genuinely has to be decoded and compressed again, which takes time proportional to the length of the clip. Old footage tends to be low resolution, which makes this considerably faster than it sounds.
Common questions
Will it look better afterwards?
No. Converting changes the packaging, not the source. Nothing can recover detail that was never captured.
There is no sound in the result.
Some old AVI files use audio codecs that were never broadly licensed. The video converts; that particular track cannot be read.
Do DivX and Xvid work?
Both decode correctly. They were the two codecs you were most likely to find inside an AVI during its peak.
Does the file leave my machine?
No, everything runs in this tab.