An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature isn’t enabled by default for all Mac users. If your Mac is missing the “Encode” menu options, or you want to adjust them, toggling the menu encoder is very simple.



Note: you will need a modern version of Mac OS to have these features available to you. Anything beyond Mac OS X version 10.7 or later will have this feature on the Mac, High Sierra, El Capitan, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, etc all include this option, but earlier versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X do not have these options.

Enable Video & Audio Encoding Tools in Mac OS X

If you don’t have the video and audio encoding options available in macOS you must enable them via System preferences, here’s how to do that:

Launch System Preferences from the  Apple menu Click on “Keyboard” and then click on the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab Select “Services” from the left, and scroll on the right for “Encode Selected Audio Files” and “Encode Selected Video Files” Check the box next to both of those options and close out of System Preferences Confirm encoding tools are now enabled by right-clicking on an audio or video file and looking for the Encode option

Now that the Mac OS X media encoder is enabled, you can right-click on media files to convert one video file format to another, convert 1080p video to lower resolutions like 720p and 480p, convert video to audio tracks, and audio to m4a which can then be turned into ringtones and text tones.

Note if you want both audio and video encoding options you need to check them both in the preferences.

Accessing the Video & Audio Encoding Tools on Mac

Once enabled, select a video or audio file from Finder in the Mac and right-click on it to see the Encode choices. Selecting one such encoder will result in a pop-up encoder window looking like this:

Conversion is surprisingly quick and produces high quality media files, the precise resolution is dependent on which output option chosen. Lengthy HD files like 1080p video files can take quite a while to convert, so give the movie time to encode to the new format or resolution.