Extract Audio from WTV to WMA — Free Online Tool
Extract audio from Windows Media Center WTV recordings and convert it to WMA format using the wmav2 codec — ideal for preserving broadcast audio in a Microsoft-native container. The conversion strips the video stream entirely and re-encodes the AAC or MP3 audio track from your DVR recording into Windows Media Audio at a configurable bitrate.
to
FFmpeg Command
Copy this command to run the same conversion locally with FFmpeg on your desktop. Download FFmpeg
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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 recorded by Windows Vista/7/10 Media Center typically contain an H.264 video stream and an AAC or MP3 audio track, along with broadcast metadata such as program titles and episode information. During this conversion, FFmpeg discards the video stream entirely using the -vn flag, then decodes the existing audio track and re-encodes it as Windows Media Audio v2 (wmav2) — Microsoft's proprietary lossy audio codec. Because WTV uses AAC or MP3 audio and WMA uses wmav2, a full decode-and-reencode is required; there is no stream-copy shortcut available here. The resulting WMA file contains only the audio at your chosen bitrate, defaulting to 128k, in a standard ASF container that Windows natively recognizes.
What Each Flag Does
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
ffmpeg
|
Invokes the FFmpeg tool, which handles all the demuxing, decoding, encoding, and muxing needed to extract and convert the audio from the WTV broadcast recording. |
-i input.wtv
|
Specifies the source Windows Media Center recording file. FFmpeg reads the WTV container and identifies all available streams — typically an H.264 video stream and an AAC or MP3 audio stream — for processing. |
-vn
|
Disables video output entirely, instructing FFmpeg to ignore the H.264 video stream from the WTV recording. This is required because WMA is an audio-only container and cannot hold a video stream. |
-c:a wmav2
|
Sets the audio encoder to wmav2 (Windows Media Audio version 2), Microsoft's proprietary lossy codec. Since the WTV source uses AAC or MP3 audio, a full re-encode is performed to produce wmav2-compatible audio for the WMA container. |
-b:a 128k
|
Sets the target audio bitrate to 128 kilobits per second for the wmav2 encoder. This is a standard quality level well-suited to broadcast TV audio and results in a file roughly 1MB per minute of audio. |
output.wma
|
Defines the output filename and tells FFmpeg to wrap the encoded wmav2 audio in an ASF/WMA container — a Microsoft-native format recognized natively by Windows Media Player and other Windows-ecosystem applications. |
Common Use Cases
- Extracting the audio commentary or dialogue from a recorded TV show to listen to on an older Windows device or media player that supports WMA but not WTV playback
- Archiving the audio track from a Windows Media Center recording of a live concert, sports event, or news broadcast into a compact, standalone audio file
- Converting recorded TV audio to WMA for playback on older portable media players (like early Zune or Windows Mobile devices) that support WMA but cannot handle WTV containers
- Stripping audio from a WTV broadcast recording to submit to a transcription or captioning service that requires a smaller, audio-only file
- Extracting recorded radio or audio-only broadcast content captured via Windows Media Center into a distributable WMA file for archiving or sharing within a Windows ecosystem
- Reducing storage footprint of a large DVR library by keeping only the audio from recordings where the video content is no longer needed
Frequently Asked Questions
WTV files embed rich broadcast metadata including program title, episode description, channel, and air date. FFmpeg will attempt to map standard metadata tags from the WTV container into the ASF/WMA container, but WMA's metadata schema is more limited and not all WTV-specific broadcast fields have direct equivalents. You can expect basic tags like title to carry over, but DVR-specific fields such as channel number or series ID are unlikely to survive the conversion.
WTV recordings typically store audio as AAC or MP3, neither of which is natively compatible with the WMA container format. The WMA container (based on Microsoft's ASF format) expects wmav1 or wmav2 encoded audio. Because the codec must change, FFmpeg has to fully decode the original audio and re-encode it as wmav2, which means a small but unavoidable quality loss compared to the source, even at high bitrates.
For typical TV broadcast audio, which is rarely mastered above CD quality, 128k wmav2 provides a good balance and is the default. If your recording contains music, live concerts, or high-fidelity stereo content, stepping up to 192k or 256k is worthwhile. Going above 192k for standard broadcast dialogue offers diminishing returns, since the source audio was already compressed during broadcast transmission before it was ever written to the WTV file.
By default, FFmpeg selects the first audio stream it identifies in the WTV file, which is typically the primary language track. WMA does not support multiple audio tracks in a single file, so only one track can be included in the output. If you need a specific alternate track — such as a secondary audio program (SAP) or a foreign language dub — you would need to add the -map 0:a:1 flag to the FFmpeg command to explicitly select the second audio stream.
Replace the 128k value in the -b:a 128k portion of the command with your desired bitrate. For example, use -b:a 192k for higher quality or -b:a 96k for a smaller file. The full modified command would look like: ffmpeg -i input.wtv -vn -c:a wmav2 -b:a 192k output.wma. Supported bitrates for wmav2 include 64k, 96k, 128k, 160k, 192k, 256k, and 320k.
Yes. On Windows, you can batch process all WTV files in a folder using a simple for loop in Command Prompt: for %f in (*.wtv) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -vn -c:a wmav2 -b:a 128k "%~nf.wma". On Linux or macOS, the equivalent bash command is: for f in *.wtv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vn -c:a wmav2 -b:a 128k "${f%.wtv}.wma"; done. This is especially useful for large DVR archives that exceed the 1GB browser limit.
Technical Notes
WTV is an ASF-derived container format specific to Windows Media Center, and while it shares some structural similarities with WMA's underlying ASF container, the codec mismatch between WTV's AAC/MP3 audio and WMA's required wmav2 audio means transcoding is mandatory. The wmav2 codec (Windows Media Audio version 2) is a lossy codec that performs competitively with MP3 at equivalent bitrates, particularly in the 128k–192k range. One notable limitation is that WMA files do not support multiple audio tracks, so any secondary audio streams in the WTV source (such as SAP channels common in North American broadcast recordings) will be silently dropped unless explicitly mapped. WTV files can be quite large — often several gigabytes for hour-long recordings — making the browser-based tool's 1GB cap a practical concern for longer content; the displayed FFmpeg command is particularly useful for processing full-length movie or sports recordings locally. The -vn flag is essential here to prevent FFmpeg from attempting to encode the H.264 video stream into the WMA container, which would fail since WMA is an audio-only format.