DV to OGA Converter

Pulling the Audio Out of a DV Capture

A .dv file is the raw bitstream a MiniDV, Digital8 or DVCAM deck hands your computer over FireWire, and it is enormous for what it holds: a fixed 25 Mbit/s of video plus uncompressed PCM audio, no matter how quiet the scene is. Our own 4.97-second NTSC DV test capture came to 17.9 MB, which works out at roughly 13 GB per hour of tape. If all you want is the interview, the band, the narration or the room tone, converting to OGA strips the picture away and leaves an Ogg file a few hundred times smaller.

This page writes an Ogg audio file (.oga). The video track is discarded — that is the point of an audio target — so plan on keeping the original .dv if you ever need the pictures back.

What DV Actually Stores as Audio

DV's audio is not an afterthought bolted onto the video; it is part of the tape's data structure, which is why the parameters are so tightly constrained. RFC 3189, the IETF document that defines how DV travels over RTP, records the permitted range as "32 kHz, 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz" sampling with "12-bit non-linear, 16-bit linear or 20-bit linear" quantization and up to eight channels — with only certain combinations legal for a given video format. In practice consumer camcorders wrote one of two modes.

Two consequences matter here. If your tape was shot in 12-bit mode you have four channels, not two, and the second pair may be silence or a later dub — set Audio Channel to Stereo if you only want the original pair mixed down. And 32 kHz is not one of the rates the Audio Sample Rate dropdown offers, so leave it on ORIGINAL to keep 32 kHz, or pick 44100 or 48000 to resample upward.

How to Convert DV to OGA

1. Upload Your DV File: Drag the .dv file onto the page or click "+ Add Files". DV captures are large, so the upload is usually the slowest part of the job — a 20-minute tape is around 4 GB.
2. Choose the Audio Codec: Open Advanced Options. The Audio Codec group offers Vorbis, Opus, FLAC and Speex, and Vorbis is the one selected for you. Vorbis is the classic Ogg pairing and plays anywhere .oga is understood; see the table below before switching.
3. Set File Compression, Channels and Sample Rate: File Compression starts on Quality Preset ("Very High (Recommended)"), with Specific file size, Custom Bitrate and Constant Bitrate (8–384 kbps) as alternatives. Audio Channel offers ORIGINAL, MONO or STEREO; Audio Sample Rate offers ORIGINAL, 8000, 12000, 16000, 24000, 44100 and 48000 Hz.
4. Trim and Convert: Trim starts at "Unchanged" and can export a single Start time / Duration range — useful when you only need one segment of a long tape. Click Convert and download the .oga. No sign-up, no watermark.

Which Ogg Codec to Pick

For a tape of interviews or narration where size matters, Opus at a modest bitrate beats Vorbis noticeably. For an archival copy of a master tape, FLAC keeps the 16-bit samples exactly as the camcorder wrote them.

Frequently Asked Questions

My DV file has no audio track — what happens?

The job fails rather than producing a silent file. An audio-only target needs an audio stream to work with, and if the DV capture has none there is nothing to write into the Ogg container, so the conversion stops with an error instead of handing you an empty .oga. This catches people who captured video-only from a deck, or whose capture software wrote the audio to a separate WAV. Check the file in VLC (Tools → Codec Information) before uploading; if there is no audio stream listed, the audio is somewhere else.

Why can't I get the Vorbis file below about 45 kbps?

Because libvorbis refuses to start at rates below a floor that depends on the sample rate and channel count, and for the common DV case — 48 kHz stereo — that floor is 45 kbps. We tested this directly: requests at 24, 32 and 40 kbps were all rejected by the encoder, and 45 kbps was the first that produced a file. Rather than fail your job, the converter lifts an impossibly low request up to the codec floor, so the output can end up larger than the size you typed into Specific file size. If you genuinely need something smaller, switch the Audio Codec to Opus, which handles 24 kbps stereo without complaint, or set Audio Channel to MONO, which lowers the floor.

Should I choose OGA or OGG for a DV soundtrack?

They are the same Ogg container, and the difference is a naming convention rather than a format one. RFC 5334 allocates .oga to the audio/ogg media type generally, and reserves .ogg for files that contain only a Vorbis bitstream — a rule that exists because a lot of older software assumed any .ogg file was Vorbis and nothing else. So .oga is the correct, unambiguous choice for an audio track in any Ogg codec, which is what this conversion produces; .ogg is the one to pick when you are feeding a legacy tool or a game engine that specifically expects Vorbis under that name. For the same codec and settings, the bytes inside are identical.

Will this preserve the four channels from a 12-bit DV tape?

Leave Audio Channel on ORIGINAL and the channel count comes through as it was on tape — Vorbis, Opus and FLAC can all carry more than two channels. Be aware of what those four channels actually are, though: in DV's 12-bit mode, channels 1–2 are the original recording and channels 3–4 are the audio-dub pair, which is often silent on tapes that were never dubbed. If you just want the original stereo pair as a normal stereo file, set Audio Channel to STEREO.

Does the converter fix the hiss and hum on an old tape?

No. This is a format conversion, not a restoration: whatever noise, hum, dropouts or level problems are on the tape are re-encoded faithfully into the Ogg file. There is no noise reduction, no normalisation and no equalisation anywhere in the pipeline. If a capture needs cleaning up, do that first in an audio editor such as Audacity, export a WAV, and convert that — restoring after a lossy encode always works less well than restoring before it.

Why is my .oga so much smaller than the .dv — did something get lost?

The size drop is almost entirely the video going away. Uncompressed DV audio at 16-bit/48 kHz stereo runs at 1 536 kbps, which is about 5% of DV's roughly 28.8 Mbit/s total; the other 95% is picture and subcode data that an audio target simply does not carry. On top of that, Vorbis or Opus compresses that 1 536 kbps down to something in the tens or low hundreds of kbps. So yes, the video is gone and the audio is lossily compressed — but nothing is being silently dropped from the soundtrack itself.

Can I extract just one section instead of the whole tape?

Yes, using Trim in Advanced Options. Switch it from "Unchanged" to a Time Range and set Start time and Duration, either in seconds or as HH:MM:SS.sss. That is the right tool for pulling a single song or answer out of a one-hour capture, and it also cuts the conversion time. If you would rather trim visually while watching the picture, run the DV through our video cutter first and convert the shortened clip — the audio-only cutter does not accept video files.

What happens to my DV file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and both the upload and the resulting .oga are deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and files are never shared or made public. The tape capture on your own machine is untouched. Because DV runs to roughly 13 GB per hour, the practical limit on a long capture is upload time over your connection rather than anything about the conversion itself — trimming the source in a local editor before uploading is often the fastest route.

Is there a way to keep the video but shrink the file?

Yes — that is a different conversion. DV to MP4 re-encodes both streams into a modern container and typically cuts a DV capture to a small fraction of its original size while keeping the picture. DV to WAV is the other extreme: audio only, but uncompressed PCM rather than Ogg, which is what most audio editors and DAWs prefer as an import format.