How to Convert WMV to MP4 (Saving Windows Movie Maker Projects)

If you bought a PC anytime between the launch of Windows XP and the death of Windows 7, you probably spent a massive amount of time playing with Windows Movie Maker.

It was the default free software for a generation of kids making terrible YouTube music videos, and a generation of parents throwing together clunky slideshows of family vacations.

When you finally finished your masterpiece, you hit “Save Movie”, and it exported as a .wmv file.

WMV (Windows Media Video) was Microsoft’s proprietary weapon designed to completely dominate the internet video space. It worked beautifully on a Windows PC and absolutely nowhere else.

If you try to view an old WMV file today on an iPhone, an Android tablet, or a modern Mac, you will mostly likely stare at a black screen. While VLC player can still sometimes brute-force its way through playing them, most modern devices flat out refuse.

To rescue those horrible nostalgic videos from total digital rot, you have to convert the WMV files to MP4.

The massive problem with cloud converters

Because WMV files are actual exported video projects, they can be incredibly large. A ten-minute family slideshow set to music might be nearly a gigabyte in size.

When you Google “convert wmv to mp4,” practically every tool on the first page of results uses cloud servers. They expect you to upload a 1GB raw video to a random website over your residential Wi-Fi.

First, uploading a 1GB file will literally take you an hour on a standard connection. Second, these online tools are not charities. Once that hour finishes, the website will invariably throw a harsh error telling you that files over 100MB require a premium $15 monthly subscription.

Even worse, you just uploaded a private video of your family to a server hosted in another country.

Use a local video transcoder

The correct way to handle this is by skipping the upload phase entirely.

By building the GetAnyFile Video Converter around WebAssembly, we eliminated the need for cloud servers. Your own web browser does the heavy lifting locally on your actual computer.

This means your giant WMV conversions are completely free, incredibly secure, and happen at the exact speed of your processor.

Here is the exact process to salvage your Windows Movie Maker files:

1. Open the WMV to MP4 Converter completely in your browser.
2. Navigate to your old hard drive and drop all your .wmv files onto the page. You can batch upload entire folders.
3. Make sure the output container is set to MP4.
4. Click Convert.
5. Once your CPU finishes crunching the numbers, click download.

MP4 is the universal standard format for everything on the internet. By converting those WMV files to MP4, you are essentially future-proofing your memories. Once the conversion is done, those videos will natively play on any phone, television, or social media platform for the next two decades.

Windows Movie Maker was a brilliant piece of software for its time. Do not let the files it created die in a proprietary Microsoft format from 2008.