Extract Audio from HEVC to WAV — Free Online Tool
Extract audio from HEVC/H.265 video files and save it as an uncompressed WAV file using PCM 16-bit signed little-endian encoding. Ideal for preserving full audio fidelity when the source is a high-efficiency video file — no lossy re-encoding, no quality compromise.
to
FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
Drop your HEVC file here
or click to browse
Free — no uploads, no signups. Your files never leave your browser.
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 (H.265) video files typically contain a compressed audio stream — commonly AAC, AC-3, or EAC-3 — alongside the highly compressed H.265 video. This tool discards the video stream entirely and decodes the audio stream, then re-encodes it into raw PCM audio at 16-bit signed little-endian depth, which is the standard uncompressed format used by WAV. Unlike a simple container remux, this process fully decodes the source audio codec and writes uncompressed pulse-code modulated samples — meaning the output WAV will be significantly larger than the audio portion of the original HEVC file, but will contain no lossy compression artifacts beyond those already present in the source audio.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg multimedia processing tool, which handles reading the HEVC input, demuxing its streams, decoding the audio, and writing the WAV output. |
-i input.hevc
|
Specifies the HEVC source file as the input. FFmpeg reads this file, identifies the H.265 video stream and any compressed audio stream (such as AAC or AC-3) contained within it. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely — the H.265 video stream from the HEVC file is ignored and not decoded or written to the output. This is what makes the command an audio extraction rather than a full transcode, and it also means FFmpeg never has to work through the computationally expensive H.265 decoding process. |
-c:a pcm_s16le
|
Sets the audio codec to PCM signed 16-bit little-endian, which is the standard uncompressed audio encoding used in WAV files. FFmpeg decodes whatever compressed audio codec was present in the HEVC source and writes raw 16-bit PCM samples into the WAV container. |
output.wav
|
Specifies the output filename and triggers FFmpeg to use the WAV container format. The .wav extension tells FFmpeg to wrap the pcm_s16le audio stream in a standard Waveform Audio File Format container compatible with virtually all audio software and operating systems. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting a clean audio track from a high-efficiency H.265 video file delivered by a broadcast or streaming pipeline for use in a digital audio workstation (DAW)
- Pulling the audio from an H.265-encoded 4K or 8K camera recording to send to an audio post-production team who needs uncompressed WAV files
- Isolating dialogue or narration audio from an HEVC-encoded screen recording or presentation video for transcription or captioning workflows
- Converting the audio from an H.265 video clip into a WAV file for import into software that does not support HEVC containers or compressed audio formats
- Archiving the audio from HEVC-compressed drone or action camera footage as a lossless-quality WAV before the original video file is edited or discarded
- Preparing audio from an H.265 video file for broadcast or mastering tools that require uncompressed PCM WAV input
Frequently Asked Questions
The WAV output is uncompressed PCM, so no additional lossy compression is applied during the extraction. However, if the audio track inside your HEVC file was already encoded with a lossy codec like AAC or AC-3, those artifacts are already baked into the source audio and will be present in the WAV output. The conversion does not recover quality that was lost during the original compression — it simply decodes the existing lossy audio into an uncompressed container.
HEVC is an extremely efficient video compression format, and the audio inside it is typically compressed with a codec like AAC. WAV using PCM encoding stores every audio sample as raw, uncompressed data — for stereo audio at 44.1 kHz and 16-bit depth, that is roughly 10 MB per minute just for audio. Because no compression is applied, WAV files are inherently much larger than the compressed audio stream inside an HEVC container, even though the HEVC file also contains a full video track.
HEVC files most commonly contain AAC, AC-3 (Dolby Digital), EAC-3 (Dolby Digital Plus), or DTS audio tracks. This tool decodes whichever compressed audio codec is present and outputs it as uncompressed PCM signed 16-bit little-endian WAV. The channel layout and sample rate from the source are preserved — so a 5.1 surround AC-3 track will be decoded to a 6-channel WAV file, and a 48 kHz source will remain at 48 kHz in the output.
Yes. The default command uses pcm_s16le for 16-bit output, but you can substitute other codecs for different bit depths: use -c:a pcm_s24le for 24-bit, -c:a pcm_s32le for 32-bit integer, or -c:a pcm_f32le for 32-bit floating point. To resample the audio, add -ar 44100 or -ar 48000 before the output filename to target a specific sample rate. For example: ffmpeg -i input.hevc -vn -c:a pcm_s24le -ar 48000 output.wav
On Linux or macOS you can loop over files in the terminal: for f in *.hevc; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a pcm_s16le "${f%.hevc}.wav"; done. On Windows Command Prompt, use: for %f in (*.hevc) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a pcm_s16le "%~nf.wav". This applies the same extraction logic to every HEVC file in the current directory, producing a separate WAV for each.
WAV has limited and inconsistently supported metadata capabilities compared to container formats like MKV or MP4. FFmpeg will attempt to copy any compatible metadata tags from the source HEVC file into the WAV output's INFO chunk, but many tags — especially those embedded in HEVC container streams — may not transfer reliably. If preserving rich metadata is important, consider post-processing the WAV with a dedicated tag editor, or using a format like FLAC that has robust metadata support.
Technical Notes
The output WAV uses the pcm_s16le codec — signed 16-bit samples stored in little-endian byte order — which is the standard CD-quality uncompressed format and the most broadly compatible PCM variant across audio software, operating systems, and hardware. The WAV container has a theoretical 4 GB file size limit due to its 32-bit chunk size header; for very long HEVC recordings, this can be exceeded and may result in a file that some players cannot open correctly. In such cases, the RF64 extension (ffmpeg flag -rf64 auto) can be used to lift that limit. Because the video stream is dropped with -vn before any video decoding occurs, the H.265 video is never decoded — this makes the extraction fast and computationally lightweight even for 4K or 8K HEVC sources. No HDR metadata, subtitle tracks, or chapter markers from the HEVC source are carried over into the WAV output, as WAV supports none of these features.