What actually changes, and what does not
An MKV and an MP4 of the same movie can hold the exact same video stream. The difference is the box, not the contents, and this tool exploits that: when the video inside is H.264 or HEVC, which covers nearly every MKV in circulation, the stream is copied across untouched. No decoding, no generation loss, done in seconds.
Audio is where MKV's flexibility bites. MKV files frequently carry AC-3, DTS or FLAC tracks, and while MP4 can technically store some of these, the players people convert for cannot play them. So incompatible audio is re-encoded to AAC, the one codec every MP4 player on earth decodes. Re-encoding audio is fast, since it is a tiny fraction of the data, and the video stays untouched while it happens.
The honest trade-offs
Subtitle tracks are dropped rather than mangled; keep the MKV if you need them. Multiple audio tracks collapse to the first. And converting the container does not change the codec: an HEVC video in an MP4 still needs a device that decodes HEVC. That covers everything reasonably modern, but if your target is an older TV that only speaks H.264, use our video converter page and re-encode instead.
None of these caveats apply to the common case. A typical MKV goes in, an MP4 with an identical picture comes out a few seconds later, and the row tells you whether the audio was copied or converted.
Limits worth knowing
Files up to 500 MB are accepted, which fits episodes and clips but not a full Blu-ray remux. The work happens in your browser, so a laptop on battery will do it slower than a desktop. And the first file triggers a one-time download of the conversion engine, which the page discloses before it starts.