Convert .MTS to MP4 on Mac lossless for Apple Photos

You have many .MTS video files from your Sony A7 for example? But you want to import them into Apple Photos or just use them on your Mac? I will show you how to achieve this!

It requires some easy use of the terminal even if you’re not a developer you should be able to do it!

First we need to install ExifTool in order to be able to manipulate the timestamp of the converted videos. Follow the original website here.

1. The file you download should be named ExifTool-12.40.dmg
2. Open the disk image, double-click on the install package, and follow the instructions. See the second item in the Notes section below if you are stopped with an “unidentified developer” message.

Second we need ffmpeg in order to rewrap our .MTS into mp4. Therefore open the terminal and use brew to install ffmpeg. If you don’t use brew yet, follow this guide to install it.

brew install ffmpeg

Now you can download my script here.

To use it, extract it and save it at a known location and run it with the folder path of your original .MTS files.

bash mts_to_mp4.sh /Users/NAME/Desktop/test_video/

If everything went well, you should have all the rewrapped .mp4 videos in your script directory!

Example output of a successful rewrapping.