How to transform MLV to MP4 fast?

Updated: August 16, 2026

An idea to implement MLV to MP4 converter is quite natural. As soon as you have raw footage, you will finally need to do raw processing and save the result. This is quite complicated task, because it involves a dozen or more operations and it takes too much time. Unfortunately, in the Fast CinemaDNG Processor software there are no own means to do encoding to MP4, but one can do that compression of processed frames via external FFmpeg.

mlv to mp4 converter Fast CinemaDNG Processor software can do raw processing with super high performance on GPU, actually in real-time or even faster, and after that external FFmpeg can encode processed frames on CPU. You just need to open your raw footage, define parameters for raw processing on GPU, and set path to external FFmpeg software to implement final encoding on CPU.

How these numbers were measured. Fastvideo benchmarks are measured on NVIDIA GPUs, timing pure GPU processing at the resolution, bit depth, format and quality stated on this page. See the full benchmark methodology and test environment and the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF). Our tools are open source on GitHub and built on NVIDIA CUDA.

Check a single module. Every module in the Fastvideo SDK comes with a command-line sample. Run it on your own images on your own GPU and compare the result with the figures published here.

Check the whole pipeline. A module in the middle of a pipeline cannot be judged on its own: its input is hard to prepare, and its output is an intermediate product you cannot look at. What matters is how it changes the final image and the total time of the schema. Two of our applications run the complete pipeline and report the time of every stage — FastVCR (live cameras or RAW files from disk, so no camera is required) and Fast CinemaDNG (DNG, offline). The benchmark module is included in the free builds of both.

Detailed benchmark data. Measured results are published on our benchmark pages: all benchmarks.

To start encoding with external FFmpeg, you can utilize the following command line:
-c:v mpeg4 -q:v 2 -r 25 "$OUTPUT_PATH$/$OUTPUT_BASE_NAME$.MP4"
where "-r 25" stands for output frame rate 25 fps. If audio file reside in the current folder, FFmpeg will include it automatically.

You can utilize h264 encoding as well, but please bear in mind, that there are some limitations on output resolution, and you won't be able to do such encoding for arbitrary resolution of your footage.

Full version of that pipeline is implemented in Fast CinemaDNG Processor software. Please visit www.fastcinemadng.com to download the sofware.

Useful links:

Download Fast CinemaDNG Processor software

About the author

Fyodor Serzhenko, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Fastvideo. He earned his PhD at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1993. Since 2009 he has led the development of Fastvideo’s GPU-accelerated image codecs and ISP modules, including the Fastvideo SDK. Connect on LinkedIn.

Why you can trust these results

Fastvideo has built GPU-accelerated image processing software since 2009. Our codecs comply with the standards they implement — JPEG (ITU-T T.81 / ISO IEC 10918) and JPEG2000 (ITU-T T.800 / ISO IEC 15444) — and our tools are open source on GitHub. Every performance figure we publish is reproducible: see our benchmark methodology, download the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF), and measure it on your own GPU.

How to transform MLV to MP4 fast?

About the author

Why you can trust these results

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