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The .mov files your iPhone, iPad and Mac produce – camera clips, screen recordings, exported edits – transcribed to text without converting them first. Files up to 10 minutes are free without an account; with a free account you get 30 free minutes, speaker labels and faster processing, then you pay per minute. About one upload in twenty here is a MOV file, almost all of them from Apple devices.
Native QuickTime support: .mov straight from the Photos app, a Mac screen recording or Final Cut – no MP4 export needed.
HEVC and H.264: both codecs the iPhone records in are accepted; only the audio track is used.
Text or subtitles: download plain text, or SRT/VTT to caption the clip in iMovie, Final Cut or CapCut.
Speaker labels: with a free account, a recorded conversation comes back with each speaker marked.
Private by default: uploads are deleted after 30 days; delete a transcript and its file earlier yourself.
Free up to 10 minutes without an account · 30 free minutes with one.
Supported formats: MOV, MP4, WebM, MPEG, 3GP · Prices
One in nine files from registered users is a .mov straight off an iPhone – camera clips, screen recordings, exported edits. No conversion step.
Facts updated August 2026
On OpenAI’s published benchmark of read speech (Common Voice 15) the large-v3 model makes about one error in 11 words in English, one in 21 in Spanish, one in 18 in German, one in 17 in Portuguese and Russian, one in 9 in French. On clean studio recordings (FLEURS) it is roughly a third better. Independent testing on real meetings and calls (Open ASR Leaderboard, 2026) puts English at 7–11 % word error. transcribe.mov runs the faster “turbo” build of the same model, which is a few tenths of a point behind on English. Real files are harder than benchmarks: background noise, cross-talk and strong accents add errors, and a wrong language guess ruins a transcript.
Sources: OpenAI large-v3 release chart (Common Voice 15, FLEURS), Open ASR Leaderboard paper 2026-03-30.
QuickTime (.mov) is the container Apple designed in 1991; MP4 was standardised from it later. Both hold the same kind of streams – H.264 or HEVC video with AAC audio on an iPhone – which is why nothing has to be converted: the audio track is read directly from the .mov.
An iPhone records 1080p at about 60–90 MB per minute in HEVC, 130 MB per minute in H.264, and 4K at 190–400 MB per minute. That is why the guest limit of 50 MB fits under a minute of camera video: for anything longer, create a free account – it allows files up to 4 GB – or export the clip at a lower resolution, which does not change the transcript at all.
On the iPhone, open the video in Photos, tap Share, then either “Save to Files” and upload it from there, or upload from the browser directly – the file picker on iOS shows the Photos library. On the Mac, drag the clip from Photos to the desktop or use Finder; screen recordings land on the desktop by default.
Three cues as the SRT download writes them for a screen recording. Import the file as captions in iMovie or Final Cut, or keep it next to the video for players such as VLC and QuickTime.
1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,240 Welcome back. Today we're looking at the quarterly numbers. 2 00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:07,180 Revenue is up eight percent, mostly from returning customers. 3 00:00:07,520 --> 00:00:10,900 Let's start with what changed since the last update.
Choose VTT instead if the clip is going onto a website or YouTube – same content, a different header and dots in the timestamps.
No. QuickTime .mov files are accepted directly; the audio track is extracted on our side. A lower-resolution export is only useful to get a long clip under the size limit – it uploads faster and the transcript is identical.
Yes. The iPhone and iPad save both as .mov, in HEVC or H.264; both are supported. Upload from the Photos library through the browser’s file picker or save the clip to Files first.
Camera video is large: a minute of 1080p is 60–130 MB, and the guest limit is 50 MB. A free account raises the limit to 4 GB and 2 hours per file, with 30 free minutes of transcription. Alternatively export the clip at 720p from Photos or iMovie.
Up to 10 minutes and 50 MB without an account, free. With a free account, 30 free minutes and files up to 2 hours and 4 GB; then minutes are bought in packs – 120 for $5.90, 300 for $10.90, 600 for $19.90 – one-time, no subscription, never expiring.
Yes. Download the transcript as SRT or VTT. iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and CapCut import SRT as captions; VTT is the format for websites and YouTube.
With an account, yes – the online transcript marks speakers as [SPEAKER_00], [SPEAKER_01] …, and the JSON export includes the labels. The subtitle files and the TXT download carry the text without speaker names.
The uploaded file is deleted from our servers automatically after 30 days; the transcript stays in your account until you delete it, which you can do at any time. Nothing is shared.
transcribe.mov uses Whisper large-v3 (the turbo build) – the open model that OpenAI benchmarks per language. On read speech it makes roughly one error in 11 words in English and one in 18–21 in Spanish, German, Portuguese or Russian; clean studio audio is better, noisy or overlapping speech is worse, and independent tests of real meetings land around 11 % word error. You get the whole file, verbatim, with punctuation and speaker labels (registered users); you fix names and terms in the editor.
Record close to the speaker in a quiet room – one voice at a time transcribes best. Upload the original file; don’t re-encode or compress it (phone .m4a and camera .mov are fine as they are). Clear speech matters more than file quality: accents and cross-talk cost more accuracy than bitrate ever will. Silence and music are filtered automatically.
For a short clip you can. Gemini takes audio and video uploads, but its free tier stops at 10 minutes of audio or 5 minutes of video per prompt and needs a Google sign-in (3 hours of audio with a paid AI Pro plan). ChatGPT has no documented audio or video transcription feature: it may try on an uploaded file, and OpenAI itself says the analysis "may not analyze the entire video or accurately interpret its audio". In both, timestamps are written by the language model, not measured, so they drift, and there are no speaker labels on uploaded files. Here the clip is transcribed in full and verbatim by a speech model, the SRT/VTT timing comes from the audio itself, speakers are labelled, files up to 10 minutes need no account at all, and your files are never used to train anything.
Facts updated August 2026
Sign up now to start transcribing your audio and video files with high accuracy, secure and private processing, and industry-leading features like speaker diarization and subtitle generation.
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