Fix MP4 to Windows Movie Maker Importing Issues

It's likely that you have some MP4 files downloaded from online video sharing sites or captured with your camera, camcorder, phone or tablets. When you try to drag and drop the files into Windows Movie Maker's timeline for adding animated text titles or applying special transition effects, you will find Windows Movie Maker can load some MP4 files with no problem, but it just does no reconize other MP4 files as below:

"I picked a new Canon Vixia HFR600. It is set to record video in MP4. But Movie Maker 2.6 does not accept MP4 video files, so I need to convert them to MPEG-2, WMV, or AVI. Something that Movie Maker 2 can accept."

"Windows Media Player 11 recognizes and plays MPEG-4 just fine but WMM doesn't recognize them. I would like to import some MPEG-4 files into Movie Maker and edit with them - is there a codecs or something that allows this? "

Why Windows Movie Maker won't import some MP4 files

After searching for Windows Movie Maker supported file formats, we can find that MP4 is one of its supported video types, but Movie Maker only read MP4 files compressed with MPEG-4 codec. However, the MP4 files downloaded from online sites or captured by device recorders can be encoded in various different video and audio codec as below:
Video codec: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (A)SP, H.264/MPEG-4, H.265/HEVC, VC-1/WMV, Real Video, Theora, Microsoft MPEG4 V2, VP8, MVC
Audio codec: MP3, WMA, AAC, AC-3, DTS,ALAC, DTS-HD

MP4 to Windows Movie Maker

If the MP4 files are encoded with one of above listed unsupported codec, Windows Movie Maker will fail to load the files. To fix this issue, you can download a Media Player Codec Pack which support the following file types:
Compress types: x265, h.265, hevc, 10bit x264, x264, h.264, avchd, avc, divx, xvid, mp4, mpeg4, mpeg-2 and many more
File types: bdmv, evo, hevc, mkv, avi, flv, webm, mp4, m4v, m4a, ts, ogm, ac3, dts, alac, flac, ape, aac, ogg, ofr, mpc, 3gp
Resolution types: 480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, 720i, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 4k

Another simple solution is converting incompatible MP4 files to Windows Movie Maker readable file formats. Here, a powerful video conversion tool in hand is called Pavtube Video Converter (best Video Converter review), with the program, you can comprehensively convert virtually any MP4 files or other unsupported file formats such as AVCHD MTS, Sony M2TS, Torrent AVI, to Movie Maker best compatible WMV video formats and WMV audio formats.

Besides that, you can also use the program to do some simple editing on the MP4 video footage. You can trim or cut video to remove unwanted parts from video, merge separate video clips into one file, split large files into small parts by file size, count or length, crop off the black borders around the video frame, add video/image/transparent text watermark to video, change video color effect or apply special rendering effects to video.

How to Import and Edit MP4 Files with Windows Movie Maker?

Step 1: Add unsupported MP4 files into the program.

Run the program on your computer and click "File" > "Add Video/Audio" or "Add from folder" to add unsupported MP4 files into the program.

Step 2: Select output format and set destination folder

Click the pull down menu of "Format", then you will be able to select a Windows Movie Maker supported format from the output format profile, choose "HD Video">"WMV HD (*.wmv)" as your output format for editing HD video on Windows Movie Maker.

Tips: For common video, you can either choose to output high quality "WMV3(WMV9)" format or fast conversion speed "WMV2(WMV8)(*.wmv)" format.

Step 3: Edit video(optional).

Check an item to active the "Video Editor" function, then click the pencil like icon on the top tool bar to open the "Video Editor" window, you can trim video length, crop video black bars, add watermark, apply sepcial rendering effect, remove/replace audio in video, etc.

Step 4: Start MP4 to Windows Movie Maker conversion.

Once the conversion is finished, you can click "Open Output Folder" button to get the output files effortlessly, and now you will have no problems to import and edit MP4 files with Windows Movie Maker. Just import the converted files to Windows Movie Maker for editing via its "Import video" option.

What's Next? Price: $35