Convert WTV to M4A — Free Online Converter

WTV (Windows TV) is the DVR recording format from Windows Media Center, containing broadcast television with MPEG-2 or H.264 video, AC3 or AAC audio, and EPG metadata (program title, channel name, description, recording timestamp, content ratings). The container uses an NTFS-like internal structure for multiplexing streams. M4A (MPEG-4 Audio) is the audio-only container using the MP4 file format, typically containing AAC or ALAC audio. It is the native audio format for iTunes, Apple Music, and all Apple devices.

Windows Media Center's TV tuner recording feature produced WTV files from 2007 until Microsoft discontinued the platform. These recordings, spanning nearly a decade of personal TV archiving, are now locked in a format that no modern media player opens natively.

Extracting audio from WTV to M4A produces universally playable audio files that integrate seamlessly with Apple's ecosystem. M4A with AAC encoding is the standard format for iTunes Store purchases, Apple Music, and iPhone/iPad audio. This makes WTV-to-M4A the natural choice for extracting TV audio intended for Apple device playback.

M4A also supports rich metadata (title, artist, album, artwork, chapters) — far more than WTV's proprietary EPG data or raw AAC streams. This allows you to organize extracted TV audio into proper albums in your music library, complete with show artwork and episode information.

FFmpeg reads the WTV container, discards the video stream, and processes the audio. If the WTV source already contains AAC audio (common in some digital broadcasts), the stream can be remuxed directly into the M4A container with zero re-encoding (-c:a copy). For AC3 sources, FFmpeg decodes and re-encodes to AAC-LC at the specified bitrate (typically 128-256 kbps). The M4A container uses MPEG-4 Part 14 with audio-only metadata. Multi-channel AC3 is downmixed to stereo by default.