Convert HEVC to WEBA — Free Online Tool
Extract and convert audio from HEVC/H.265 video files into WEBA format, encoding the audio stream with the Opus codec at 128k bitrate by default. This is ideal for isolating high-quality audio from H.265 video for web playback, since WEBA with Opus delivers excellent clarity at low bitrates and is natively supported by modern browsers.
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FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
Drop your HEVC file here
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Settings
Note: Browser-based encoding uses approximate quality targets. For precise CRF compression, copy the FFmpeg command above and run it on your desktop.
Estimated output:
Conversion Complete!
DownloadHow It Works
HEVC (.hevc) files contain a raw H.265 video bitstream, and may carry an accompanying audio stream encoded in a format like AAC or AC-3. During this conversion, FFmpeg discards the entire video stream entirely (using the -vn flag) and transcodes only the audio into Opus, wrapping it in a WebM-based WEBA container. Because HEVC's audio codec is almost never Opus, a full audio transcode always occurs — the original audio samples are decoded and then re-encoded into Opus at the specified bitrate. No video data is preserved in the output, so the resulting WEBA file contains audio only.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg tool, which is running here as a WebAssembly (FFmpeg.wasm) instance entirely inside your browser — no data is sent to a server. |
-i input.hevc
|
Specifies the input file, a raw HEVC/H.265 bitstream. FFmpeg will probe this file for available streams — in this case, the video stream is present but will be discarded, and any audio stream will be transcoded. |
-c:a libopus
|
Selects the Opus encoder (libopus) for the audio output stream. Opus is the default and recommended codec for WEBA containers, offering superior compression efficiency compared to Vorbis, particularly at the 128k bitrate used here. |
-b:a 128k
|
Sets the Opus audio bitrate to 128 kilobits per second. This is a good general-purpose quality level for music and mixed content; Opus at 128k typically matches or exceeds the perceptual quality of MP3 at 192k, making it efficient for web delivery. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely, ensuring no video stream from the HEVC input is written to the output file. This is required because WEBA is an audio-only format and cannot contain a video track. |
output.weba
|
Specifies the output filename with the .weba extension. FFmpeg uses this extension to automatically select the WebM-derived audio container format, which wraps the Opus-encoded audio stream for browser-compatible playback. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting a music score or dialogue track from an H.265-encoded film or TV episode to use in a web application that requires browser-native audio playback
- Pulling the audio from an HEVC-encoded drone or action camera clip to use as a standalone ambient sound file for a website or game
- Converting the audio commentary from an H.265 video production archive into a lightweight WEBA file for streaming on a low-bandwidth web portal
- Isolating a recorded lecture or conference talk captured in HEVC format into an Opus-encoded WEBA file for embedding in a browser-based e-learning platform
- Stripping audio from HEVC screencasts or tutorials to create podcast episodes or audio-only versions of video content optimized for web delivery
- Preparing audio assets from H.265 source footage for use in WebRTC or web audio pipelines where Opus is the preferred or required codec
Frequently Asked Questions
Not losslessly — the audio is always re-encoded into Opus during this conversion, which introduces some generation loss. The HEVC file's original audio (typically AAC, AC-3, or similar) is decoded to raw PCM and then re-encoded into Opus at 128k by default. At 128k, Opus is perceptually excellent and generally indistinguishable from higher bitrates for most content, but if the original audio was already lossy, you are compressing a compressed signal a second time, which can accumulate artifacts.
No, this is intentional. WEBA is an audio-only container format derived from WebM, and it is designed to hold only Opus or Vorbis audio streams. The -vn flag in the FFmpeg command explicitly drops the video stream before writing the output. If you need to retain the video alongside converted audio, you would need to target a different output format such as WebM or MP4 instead.
Replace the value after -b:a in the command with your desired bitrate. For example, use -b:a 64k for a much smaller file suitable for speech content, or -b:a 192k for higher fidelity music. Opus is particularly efficient at low bitrates — 64k Opus typically sounds better than 128k MP3 — so you may find 96k or 128k sufficient for most use cases. Rates above 192k offer diminishing returns with Opus.
Yes, WEBA supports both Opus and Vorbis audio. To use Vorbis, change -c:a libopus to -c:a libvorbis in the command. However, Opus is generally recommended over Vorbis because it achieves better audio quality at equivalent bitrates, has lower latency, and is more widely supported in modern browsers and WebRTC contexts. Vorbis is an older codec and Opus is considered its successor.
Raw .hevc files sometimes contain only the video bitstream with no audio at all, especially if they are demuxed from a container like MKV or MP4. If FFmpeg finds no audio stream in your input, it will produce an empty or failed output. You can check whether your file contains audio by running ffprobe input.hevc before converting. If there is no audio track, this HEVC-to-WEBA conversion has no meaningful data to extract.
Yes, on the command line you can loop over multiple files using a shell script. For example, in bash: for f in *.hevc; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libopus -b:a 128k -vn "${f%.hevc}.weba"; done. This processes every .hevc file in the current directory and outputs a matching .weba file. The browser-based tool on this page processes one file at a time, so the local FFmpeg command is especially useful for bulk conversions of large libraries.
Technical Notes
WEBA is essentially a WebM container restricted to audio-only content, and the Opus codec it carries was specifically designed for web and real-time communication use cases. Opus operates at bitrates from 6k to 510k and uses a hybrid SILK/CELT architecture that makes it exceptionally efficient for both speech and music. When converting from HEVC, the audio codec inside the .hevc stream (commonly AAC or E-AC-3 in broadcast workflows) must be fully decoded and re-encoded — there is no possibility of stream copying audio into Opus since they are entirely different codecs. HEVC's metadata fields such as chapter markers, subtitle tracks, and multiple audio tracks are all discarded, as WEBA supports none of these features. The output WEBA file will contain a single mono or stereo Opus stream depending on the channel layout of the source audio; if the source has surround sound (5.1 or 7.1), FFmpeg will downmix it to stereo by default when targeting Opus at standard bitrates. For high-channel-count audio, you may need to explicitly set -ac and increase the bitrate accordingly. WEBA files are broadly playable in Chromium-based browsers and Firefox but have limited native support in Safari, which historically has had inconsistent WebM/Opus support.