Extract Audio from WTV to ALAC — Free Online Tool
Extract audio from Windows Media Center TV recordings (.wtv) and save it as lossless ALAC in an M4A container. This tool strips the video stream entirely and re-encodes the AAC or MP3 audio track from your DVR recording into Apple Lossless — perfect for archiving broadcast audio without any generation loss.
to
FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
Drop your WTV 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
WTV files produced by Windows Vista/7 Media Center typically contain an H.264 video stream alongside an AAC or MP3 audio track. This conversion discards the video entirely using the -vn flag, then re-encodes the audio stream into ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) stored inside an MPEG-4 (.m4a) container. Because the source audio in WTV is lossy (AAC or MP3) and ALAC is lossless, the output is a bit-perfect preservation of the decoded audio — meaning no additional quality is lost beyond what was already lost during the original broadcast encoding. The resulting M4A file is fully compatible with iTunes, Apple Music, and any ALAC-capable player, and will be slightly larger than the source audio due to lossless compression of the decoded PCM data.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg program. In the browser-based tool, this runs via FFmpeg.wasm compiled to WebAssembly, so no local installation is required. For desktop use, you need FFmpeg installed and available on your system PATH. |
-i input.wtv
|
Specifies the input file — a WTV container produced by Windows Media Center. FFmpeg reads the embedded ASF-based structure to demux the H.264 video, AAC/MP3 audio, and any additional streams such as subtitles or multiple audio tracks. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely, telling FFmpeg to ignore the H.264 video stream from the WTV recording. This is necessary because M4A is an audio-only container and cannot hold video, and it also avoids wasting processing time re-encoding a video stream you don't need. |
-c:a alac
|
Sets the audio codec to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). FFmpeg decodes the source AAC or MP3 audio from the WTV file to raw PCM and then re-encodes it losslessly using ALAC, producing output that is a bit-perfect representation of the decoded audio with no further quality loss. |
output.m4a
|
Defines the output filename and container. The .m4a extension tells FFmpeg to use the MPEG-4 audio container, which is the standard and correct container for ALAC audio and ensures compatibility with iTunes, Apple Music, iOS, and other ALAC-aware players. |
Common Use Cases
- Archiving the audio from a recorded TV documentary or news broadcast in lossless quality for long-term preservation without re-encoding degradation
- Extracting a recorded radio program or talk show captured via Windows Media Center to an ALAC file for listening in Apple Music or on an iPhone
- Pulling the soundtrack from a recorded concert or live performance broadcast off a WTV DVR file into a lossless format suitable for high-fidelity audio playback
- Converting a library of old Windows Media Center recordings to ALAC so they can be organized and played in iTunes on a Mac without needing to transcode to a lossy format
- Saving the audio commentary track from a recorded sports broadcast as a standalone ALAC file for later review or editing in a DAW
- Stripping audio from a large WTV recording to reduce storage footprint while retaining the highest possible audio fidelity for the content that matters
Frequently Asked Questions
No — ALAC is lossless, but it cannot recover quality that was already discarded during broadcast encoding. WTV recordings store audio as AAC or MP3, both of which are lossy formats. This conversion decodes that lossy audio and re-encodes it into ALAC losslessly, meaning the output is a perfect, bit-accurate copy of the decoded audio signal. You will not hear any additional degradation, but you also will not gain fidelity beyond what the original broadcast captured.
The source WTV file stores audio as compressed AAC or MP3, which use psychoacoustic tricks to discard audio data and achieve very small file sizes. ALAC, by contrast, compresses the full uncompressed PCM audio signal losslessly, which is inherently larger than a lossy codec at equivalent duration. Expect ALAC output to be roughly 3–5x larger than the equivalent AAC audio stream from the same WTV recording.
WTV files embed rich DVR metadata including program title, channel, broadcast time, and episode information. FFmpeg can read some of this metadata during conversion, and ALAC inside M4A supports metadata tags (title, artist, album, etc.), so common fields may be carried over. However, WTV-specific DVR fields like channel number or scheduled recording data will not have direct equivalents in the M4A tag schema and will be dropped. You may want to verify tags in iTunes or a tag editor after conversion.
By default, FFmpeg selects the first audio stream it finds in the WTV file, which is typically the primary language track. WTV supports multiple audio tracks (e.g., secondary languages or SAP), but ALAC in M4A does not support multiple audio tracks in a single file. If you need a specific track other than the default, you can modify the FFmpeg command to add -map 0:a:1 (for the second audio track) before the output filename to select it explicitly.
Yes. On Windows, you can run a simple for loop in Command Prompt: for %f in (*.wtv) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a alac "%~nf.m4a". On macOS or Linux, use: for f in *.wtv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a alac "${f%.wtv}.m4a"; done. This processes every WTV file in the current directory and outputs a matching ALAC M4A file for each one.
ALAC was open-sourced by Apple in 2011 and is now supported on a wide range of platforms beyond Apple devices. VLC, foobar2000, and MPC-HC all play ALAC on Windows. Android supports ALAC natively from Android 5.0 (Lollipop) onward. However, if your target player does not support ALAC, you may want to consider FLAC instead, which has broader native support on non-Apple platforms, though FLAC uses the .flac container rather than M4A.
Technical Notes
WTV is a container format proprietary to Windows Media Center and uses a structure based on the Advanced Systems Format (ASF). FFmpeg has solid read support for WTV, including demuxing multiple audio and video streams and reading embedded EPG-style metadata. The audio codec inside a WTV file is almost universally AAC (when recorded from digital broadcasts) or MP3 (from analog or older tuner sources). ALAC, the output codec, operates at whatever bit depth and sample rate the decoded source audio provides — typically 16-bit/48kHz for broadcast content. Since ALAC has no quality parameter (it is lossless by definition), there are no bitrate or quality settings to tune. The -vn flag is essential here: without it, FFmpeg would attempt to encode the H.264 video stream into the output, which M4A does not support as a video container, causing an error. One known limitation is that WTV subtitle and closed-caption streams are not compatible with M4A and will be silently dropped, which is expected behavior for an audio-only extraction workflow.