3GP to MP4 Converter

Before smartphones, most mobile phones recorded video as 3GP. The format is specified by the 3GPP in TS 26.244, and it was designed for the slow networks and small screens of the time: tiny frame sizes, low frame rates and very small files that could be sent in an MMS message. Phones on CDMA networks used the closely related 3G2 format.

Those clips are still sitting on old memory cards, in backup folders and in exported message archives. The trouble is that the codecs inside them have fallen out of use. The picture is often H.263 or MPEG-4 Part 2, and the sound is often AMR, a speech codec built for mobile calls. A current player may show the picture without sound, refuse the file, or not list the .3gp extension at all.

Converting rewrites the clip as MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio. The file stays small, and it plays on any current phone, computer, TV and video website.

The MP4 keeps the resolution and frame rate of the original, so a clip recorded at a small size stays small. That is deliberate: enlarging an old phone video adds no detail and only makes the blockiness easier to see. On a phone screen or in a small window the clips look the way they did on the original device.

The sound improves most. AMR was designed for speech at very low bitrates, and turning it into AAC does not add quality, but it does mean the audio plays everywhere instead of being silently dropped. Voices in family clips are usually perfectly clear once the player can decode them.

Videos received by MMS are a special case. Networks limited the size of a multimedia message, so phones recorded MMS clips at the smallest frame size and the lowest bitrate they offered, often only a few seconds long. When you export an old message archive or move a SIM-era phone's data to a computer, those clips usually come out as 3GP or 3G2 files.

They convert like any other 3GP file, and they are small enough to fit many into one batch. Expect them to look soft on a large screen: the detail was removed when the clip was first recorded for sending, and no converter can bring it back. What the conversion does give you is a file that will keep playing as phones and players change, which is the point of an archive.

If a file refuses to convert, check that it really is a video. Some phones saved voice-only MMS messages with a .3gp extension too; for those, Video to Audio is the better tool.

Old phones often stored dozens of short clips with names like VID0001.3gp. Add up to 20 at a time, each up to 95 MB, and download the MP4s together. Uploaded files are removed after processing and the converted ones 30 minutes later, so nothing stays on a server.

Once the clips are MP4, they can go into the same photo library or cloud backup as your newer videos. MP4 is the video format that photo libraries and backup services handle most reliably, so converted clips are far less likely to be skipped during an import.

If you only want the sound of a clip, such as a recorded voice message, the Video to Audio tool saves it as MP3. For other formats, or for clips from camcorders and digital cameras such as AVI files, the Video Converter page handles the full list, and AVI to MP4 covers that case directly.