Convert .mov to .mp4 with ffmpeg

I recently wanted to save a Quicktime screen recording .mov file as .mp4.

There are a number of tools online, but why load any of those when you can just run ffmpeg from your terminal! You can download their installer or on a Mac, just run brew install ffmpeg.

To convert it and also compress the result, you can run:

ffmpeg -i my-video.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec mp2 my-video.mp4

This went from a 24MB Quicktime Movie file to a 3.7MB MP4!