Convert WTV to OGG — Free Online Converter

WTV (Windows TV) is the Windows Media Center DVR recording format, storing broadcast television with MPEG-2 or H.264 video, AC3 or AAC audio, and EPG metadata in an NTFS-like container. Windows Media Center created these files from TV tuner hardware, recording scheduled programs and live TV across cable, satellite, and over-the-air sources from 2007 until its discontinuation. OGG (Ogg Vorbis) is the open-source lossy audio codec from the Xiph.org Foundation, offering patent-free audio compression with quality rivaling AAC and surpassing MP3.

WTV recordings contain broadcast audio that may be worth preserving independently — concert recordings, radio programs, music shows, and spoken-word content. OGG provides an open, royalty-free path to extract and preserve this audio.

Extracting audio from WTV to OGG produces compact, high-quality audio files in a completely open format. OGG Vorbis is patent-free and royalty-free, making it preferred for open-source projects, Linux distributions, and platforms that avoid proprietary codec licensing. Firefox and Chrome natively play OGG audio in web pages without plugins.

For users who value open standards or deploy audio on open-source platforms (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, OpenStreetMap, many educational platforms), OGG is the standard choice. It delivers quality comparable to AAC and noticeably better than MP3 at equivalent bitrates.

FFmpeg demuxes the WTV container, discards the video stream, decodes the AC3 or AAC audio, and re-encodes to Vorbis within the OGG container. Vorbis quality is controlled by the -q:a flag (scale of -1 to 10, where 3 equals approximately 112 kbps and 6 equals approximately 192 kbps). Multi-channel 5.1 AC3 sources are downmixed to stereo by default. The encoding is entirely software-based and handles any sample rate from the broadcast source.