What Format Is a Teams Recording? (.mp4, Officially)

A Microsoft Teams meeting recording is an .mp4 file. That is the short answer, and Microsoft does state it — but in exactly one sentence, buried in step 4 of a support article about playing a recording from a channel.

This guide shows you how to get to that file, how to confirm the format yourself, and — just as important — which properties of the file Microsoft's documentation does not pin down, so you know what you are guessing at when an app rejects the video.

Before you start

You need three things:

• Access to the recording. Teams stores recordings in the cloud, not on your machine. The support page on finding recordings puts it plainly: "Teams meeting recordings are stored in either OneDrive for work or school and SharePoint."
• Permission to download. Microsoft's own pages disagree on who has it — see Step 3.
• To know which kind of meeting it was. A channel meeting, a private meeting, and a 1:1 call each land in a different place.

Step 1: Find the file where Teams actually put it

The destination depends on the meeting type. Every row below comes from Microsoft's admin article on recording storage and permissions in OneDrive and SharePoint:

That third row is the one that costs people the most time. For a group call, the file is not in the organizer's OneDrive — it is in the OneDrive of whoever pressed Record.

Step 2: Confirm the extension — the one official sentence

Open the channel, find the recording, and look at the entry in the file list. Microsoft's "Play, share, and download meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams" page, under "Play a meeting recording → From a channel," gives this as step 4:

"Find and select the recording. The recording is an .mp4 file and has the Recording icon at the beginning of the line."

Across the 20 official Microsoft pages we checked while writing this, that is the only sentence that names the file extension of a meeting recording. It is not in the limits and specifications table, not in the recording overview, and not in the storage and permissions article — it is a throwaway clause in a playback instruction. If you have been searching for a "Teams recording format" page and finding nothing, that is why.

Step 3: Download it, if you are allowed to

Here the documentation splits three ways, and it is worth knowing before you promise a file to someone.

• The play and share support page says: "Only the meeting organizer can download the meeting recording."
• The start, stop, and find recordings support page says: "The meeting organizer automatically owns the recording. By default, only meeting organizers and co-organizers can download or delete the recording."
• The admin storage and permissions article's table for an ad-hoc or scheduled meeting says organizers have full permissions, co-organizers can edit and share, and "All other members of the meeting from the same organization as the organizer have read access, but no sharing and download permissions."

Treat the admin table as your planning baseline — it is the one that breaks the rules down per meeting type — and expect that you may need the organizer to share the file with you explicitly.

There is also an admin switch that removes the download option entirely. Microsoft's article on blocking recording downloads describes the result: "Users have browser-only access to play the meeting recordings or view transcripts with no ability to download or sync files or access them through apps." If your Download button is missing, that is a policy question for your IT admin, not something to work around.

Step 4: What .mp4 does not tell you

This is the part that matters once you take the file somewhere else. .mp4 is a container, not a codec. It describes how the streams are packed, not how they were encoded.

For Teams meeting recordings, Microsoft's documentation stops at the container. The 20 official pages we reviewed do not state the video codec, the audio codec, the resolution, the frame rate, or the bitrate — so the very common claim that "Teams records H.264/AAC" is an inference, not a documented fact. If you need those values for a spec sheet or an ingest pipeline, check the official documentation rather than trusting a number you read in a forum.

What Microsoft does give you is one size figure, in the storage planning section of the admin article:

"The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB."

That is stated flat, with no quality tier attached to it — the docs do not say what resolution or bitrate produces it, or whether it is an average or a ceiling. Use it for capacity planning, not for reverse-engineering a bitrate.

Because the codec is undocumented, the fastest way to settle a "will this play in my editor" question is to run the file through a standard MP4 conversion and see whether the problem follows it. The same applies if what you actually have is a .mov from a different recorder in the same project folder:

Try it right here

Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.

Loading tool…

This runs in your browser tab — the video is read from disk and processed locally, which matters when the file is an internal meeting you should not be uploading to a random web service. If you also need to shrink it before sending it out, compress video handles that pass, and the full list is at all Clapr tools.

Common mistakes

1. Assuming .mp4 means H.264. It may well be, but Microsoft's Teams pages stop at the container, so do not write a codec into documentation your team will rely on.
2. Confusing a meeting recording with a Teams video clip. The clip feature is a different thing: "In Teams, you can record up to a minute of video or audio and send it to people in one-on-one chats, group chats and channel discussions." That page mentions an .mp4 download too, but with a one-minute cap.
3. Expecting subtitles inside the file. The play and share page is explicit: "Captions aren't captured in recordings or downloads. However, you can turn them on while viewing a recording in Teams or in the browser on its Microsoft 365 video player page."
4. Expecting one file for a long meeting. The limits page lists the recording maximum as 4 hours or 1.5 GB — either one triggers it — and adds: "When this limit is reached, the recording ends and automatically restarts." Two files from one long meeting is documented behaviour.
5. Hunting for the transcript in the folder listing. Microsoft states there is "no direct access to see or manage the captions and transcript file in the file explorer for OneDrive for Business or SharePoint."

FAQ

What format is a Teams recording? An .mp4 file. The only official statement of this sits in the channel playback steps: "The recording is an .mp4 file and has the Recording icon at the beginning of the line."

What codec and resolution does Teams record in? The official pages we checked do not state the codec, resolution, frame rate, or bitrate — only the .mp4 container and a 400 MB per hour size estimate. Check the official documentation before quoting any encoding spec.

Why did my meeting produce two .mp4 files? Because a single recording tops out at 4 hours or 1.5 GB, whichever comes first, and Microsoft states that at that point "the recording ends and automatically restarts."

Can I get an .srt file out of Teams? Not directly. The live transcript page says organizers and co-organizers can download a transcript "as a .docx or .vtt file." Convert the VTT yourself with VTT to SRT if your editor needs SubRip — the differences are covered in subtitle formats compared.

Is this the same as how Zoom stores recordings? No — the two platforms name and package their outputs differently. See Zoom recording file formats explained for that side, and more how-to guides for the rest of the series.

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Quotes above are from Microsoft's official Teams documentation on learn.microsoft.com and support.microsoft.com, checked 16 September 2026. Microsoft revises these pages regularly — verify against the live page before relying on a number.