Convert M4V to ALAC — Free Online Converter

M4V is Apple's video container that wraps H.264 video and AAC audio, used primarily for iTunes Store purchases. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is Apple's lossless compression format — it achieves roughly 50% compression compared to raw PCM while guaranteeing bit-perfect reconstruction on playback. Converting M4V to ALAC extracts the audio and encodes it losslessly, producing files that are smaller than AIFF or WAV but preserve every decoded sample.

ALAC gives you the best of both worlds within Apple's ecosystem: lossless audio quality with file sizes roughly half that of uncompressed AIFF. It is natively supported by iTunes, Apple Music, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and HomePod. If you want to archive audio from M4V files without any quality compromise and keep file sizes manageable, ALAC is the ideal format for Apple-centric workflows.

FFmpeg decodes the AAC audio from the M4V container, then encodes it using the ALAC codec and wraps it in an M4A (MPEG-4 audio) container. ALAC is a lossless codec, so every decoded PCM sample from the AAC stream is preserved perfectly in the output. Typical ALAC files are 50-70% the size of equivalent WAV/AIFF files. The process involves two stages: AAC decode → PCM → ALAC encode, all handled in a single FFmpeg pipeline.