AVCHD to WTV Converter

AVCHD to WTV: Putting Camcorder Footage Into a Recorded TV Library

.wtv is Windows Recorded TV Show, the container Windows Media Center wrote when it captured from a TV tuner. It arrived with the Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 for Vista, became standard in the Media Center editions of Windows 7, and replaced the older ASF-based .dvr-ms format that Windows XP Media Center Edition used. Then it stopped — Media Center was not included in Windows 10 and is removed on upgrade, and nothing Microsoft has shipped since reads or writes WTV.

So there is exactly one situation in which this conversion is the right answer: you still run a Windows 7 or 8.1 Media Center machine and you want home video from an AVCHD camcorder to appear in its Recorded TV library alongside your tuner captures, with a thumbnail and an entry in the guide. For every other goal — playing the clip, editing it, sharing it, archiving it — AVCHD to MP4 is what you want, and if you have arrived here holding a real tuner recording that you want to open somewhere else, the traffic almost always flows the other way through WTV to MP4.

How to Convert AVCHD to WTV

1. Upload Your AVCHD File: Drag the .avchd onto the page or click "+ Add Files". This page accepts the .avchd extension only, and several clips can be queued to run with the same settings.
2. Use Constant Quality Rather Than the Preset: File Compression opens on Quality Preset at "Very High (Recommended)", which multiplies the source clip's own bitrate rather than setting an absolute one — a poor fit for a camcorder file that was already recorded at up to 24 Mbit/s. Switch to Constant Quality, which on this page is a genuine CRF on a 16-51 scale opening at 23, where lower means better.
3. Leave Video resolution on Keep original: A Media Center library plays to a television, and AVCHD is already a high-definition format, so there is nothing to gain from rescaling. Video resolution opens on Keep original, with Resolution Percentage, Preset Resolutions, Width, Height and Width x Height available if you have a specific reason. Trim takes a Start time and a Duration.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .wtv, then drop it into your Recorded TV folder. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, re-encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

The Two Empty Dropdowns, and What Gets Chosen Instead

Open Advanced Options on this page and you will find a Video Codec heading and an Audio Codec heading with nothing underneath either of them. That is not a rendering fault: every codec entry in the option set carries an allow-list of the output formats it may be offered for, and WTV appears on none of those lists, so both groups draw as empty headings and the codecs are decided for you.

They are decided as follows, and it is worth stating because "WTV" makes people think MPEG-2:

• Video is H.264. WTV is grouped with the H.264 targets in the option configuration, and even where it were not, H.264 is the pipeline's fallback for any container it holds no specific default for. Both routes end in the same place.
• Audio is AC-3. No audio codec is nominated for WTV anywhere in the pipeline, so the muxer's own default applies, and the WTV muxer defaults to Dolby Digital. On a test conversion the audio track came out as AC-3, 48 kHz stereo at 192 kbit/s.
• Which means the codec pair does not change at all. AVCHD already stores H.264 video next to a Dolby Digital soundtrack, so this conversion swaps the wrapper — an MPEG-2 transport stream for a WTV file — while keeping the same two codec families on both sides.
• It is still a re-encode. Nothing here copies a stream through untouched, so the H.264 video is decoded and encoded again and the AC-3 audio likewise. Because a second lossy generation is happening, the File Compression setting genuinely matters, and Constant Quality is the most predictable handle you have. Moving that CRF slider on our 1080p test clip produced 6,844,416 bytes at 18, 4,485,120 bytes at 23 and 1,716,224 bytes at 30 — the control is real and its range is wide.

Real Media Center recordings, by contrast, are usually MPEG-2 video from an over-the-air or cable tuner, with MPEG-1 Layer II or AC-3 audio. Windows 7 Media Center could decode H.264 from ATSC broadcasts, so an H.264 WTV is within what it expects — but if your particular setup insists on MPEG-2, this page cannot produce it, because there is no codec control to change.

Checking You Actually Got a WTV

WTV is a proprietary format with no published specification, so the useful checks are byte-level. All three of these were confirmed on files produced by this converter.

If a file you have been handed fails the first two checks, it is not a WTV whatever its extension says.

AVCHD and WTV Side by Side

The AVCHD codec and bitrate figures are as published in the official AVCHD format specification.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are the Video Codec and Audio Codec sections empty?

Because WTV is not on any codec's allow-list in the option configuration, so no codec entry is eligible to be offered and both groups render as headings with no children. It is a real quirk of the option set rather than a loading problem — waiting or reloading will not populate them. The practical effect is that you get H.264 video and AC-3 audio and cannot change either. That combination is a sensible one for the format, and it happens to match what AVCHD already contains.

Will a converted WTV show up in Windows Media Center's Recorded TV library?

It should, provided you place the file in a folder Media Center is configured to watch for recorded television and the machine is running Windows 7 or 8.1 with Media Center installed. What it will not have is the recording metadata a genuine tuner capture carries — programme title, channel, broadcast time, series information and the guide data that populate the library entry. Media Center will fall back to the filename, so name the file usefully before you copy it across.

Can I open a WTV file on Windows 10 or 11?

Not with anything Microsoft ships. Media Center is not included in Windows 10 and is removed during an upgrade, and no later version restores it, so the operating system has no handler for the format at all. Third-party players built on ffmpeg — VLC, MPV, MPC-HC — read WTV files perfectly well because the demuxer exists there, so playback is usually a matter of installing one of those. For anything beyond playback, converting the file out with WTV to MP4 is the more practical route.

Since AVCHD is already H.264 and AC-3, can this be a lossless rewrap?

No. The codec families are the same on both sides, which makes it tempting to assume the compressed streams are simply moved into a new container, but the server always decodes and re-encodes — there is no stream-copy path on this route. The consequence is a second generation of lossy compression on both the picture and the sound, and the reason the File Compression controls have any effect at all. Set Constant Quality to 18 or 20 if you want the loss to be as close to invisible as the format allows.

Which File Compression mode should I use for camcorder footage?

Constant Quality, at a CRF between 18 and 23. The mode the page opens on, Quality Preset, does not set an absolute rate — it scales the source clip's own bitrate, and the "Very High (Recommended)" rung asks for 1.32x it. On a camcorder file recorded at up to 24 Mbit/s that is an ask for roughly 32 Mbit/s of H.264 for no visible gain and a much larger file. Constant Quality lets you name the quality you want and lets the encoder spend whatever bitrate that costs, which on typical camcorder material is far less than the source used.

Does this deinterlace 1080i camcorder recordings?

No — there is no deinterlacing filter anywhere in this pipeline, under any setting. AVCHD camcorders that record in a 1080i mode store two fields per frame captured a moment apart, and the horizontal combing on moving subjects is encoded straight into the WTV. Media Center and the television it feeds will apply their own deinterlacing on playback, which is normally the right place for it to happen with interlaced broadcast-style material — but the file itself keeps the combing. If you need it removed permanently, do that in a desktop editor before uploading.

My camcorder wrote .MTS files, not .avchd. What do I do?

Use the page that matches your filename. This one accepts the .avchd extension only, and no camcorder actually writes it — AVCHD clips are .MTS on the memory card and .M2TS after being imported into a BDMV folder or onto a disc, so a .avchd is nearly always the result of a rename or a converter. MTS to WTV and M2TS to WTV cover the real spellings. A rename does work, because the transport-stream bytes are identical, but there is no reason to do it.

Why is the WTV file slightly longer than the AVCHD I uploaded?

Because the WTV container is sector-aligned and the muxer pads out to a whole 4,096-byte boundary, which extends the last fragment slightly. On our test file a 6.005-second AVCHD produced a 6.096-second WTV — under a tenth of a second, and it scales with the sector size rather than with the clip length, so a one-hour recording gains the same negligible amount. It is a property of the container, not a fault in the conversion, and Media Center does not care.

How large a file can I upload, and how long do you keep it?

There is no fixed per-file cap; upload size and connection speed are the real constraint. AVCHD is heavy — the specification allows up to 24 Mbit/s, and 18 Mbit/s when recording to DVD media — so an hour of footage is several gigabytes and must upload in full before conversion starts. If you only need part of a clip, setting a Start time and a Duration under Trim is far quicker. Everything you send travels over an encrypted connection, is converted on our servers, and both the upload and the output are deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public and no account is required.