DV to WMA Converter

Extract the Audio from a DV Tape Capture as WMA

This page decodes the soundtrack from a .dv file — a MiniDV, DVCAM, Digital8, or DVCPRO transfer — and writes it as a .wma. The picture is discarded; only the audio comes back. There is really one reason to choose this target over the alternatives: something in your chain specifically wants Windows Media Audio — an older Windows application, a Windows Media Player library that has been curated for twenty years, a DLNA server, or a car head unit from the era when .wma was on the badge. If nothing has actually asked you for .wma, DV to MP3 plays in more places and DV to WAV loses nothing at all. The one genuine advantage here is the source: DV never compressed its audio, so whatever you encode is a clean first-generation result rather than a lossy file re-squeezed.

How to Convert DV to WMA

1. Upload Your DV File: Drag the file onto the page or click "+ Add Files". A raw .dv stream and a DV-in-AVI or DV-in-QuickTime capture all decode here, and several clips can be queued with the same settings.
2. Pick the Audio Codec: The Audio Codec group offers WMA v2, which is the default and the right answer for essentially everyone, and WMA v1, the original 1999 encoder kept for devices that predate its replacement.
3. Set the Quality Preset or a Bitrate: File Compression opens on Quality Preset, whose dropdown starts at Highest and steps down through Very High (Recommended), High, Medium, Low, Very Low, and Lowest. To name a number instead, switch to Custom Bitrate (preselected at 128 Kbps), Constant Bitrate (a dropdown from 8 up to 384 kbps, preselected at 128 kbps), or Specific file size for a byte target.
4. Set Audio Sample Rate, Audio Channel, and Trim (Optional), then Convert: Audio Sample Rate stays on Original, or force 8000 through 48000 Hz. Audio Channel offers Original, Mono, or Stereo, and Trim takes a start time and a duration. Click "Convert" and save the .wma. No sign-up, no watermark.

Do Not Just Accept the Highest Preset

The Quality Preset dropdown opens on Highest, and on this page that is a worse default than it sounds. The preset scale maps to a percentage of the codec's supported bitrate range, and standard WMA's range in this converter tops out at 320 kbps — a rate the codec was never designed around. We measured the encoder's actual output across two very different test signals and it overshoots its requested rate: mildly in the middle of the range, and by roughly double at the very top, where a 320 kbps request landed near 600 kbps. You get a file two or three times bigger than it needs to be, for a quality difference nobody can hear on a standard-definition camcorder soundtrack.

Actual files run a little above these figures because the ASF container adds overhead on top of the audio payload. For a tape transfer, set Custom Bitrate to 128 or 192 kbps, or move the preset down to High or Medium, and you will get a file that sounds the same as Highest at a fraction of the size.

WMA vs the Alternatives for a DV Soundtrack

The honest summary: standard WMA holds a small edge over MP3 at very low bitrates, the two are broadly comparable from about 128 kbps upward, and Microsoft's old marketing claim of equal quality at half the size did not survive independent listening tests. What WMA genuinely lacks is reach — Apple's ecosystem, most phones, and browsers do not decode it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I lose audio quality converting DV to WMA?

Some, but you start from the best possible position. DV stores uncompressed linear PCM — 16-bit stereo at 48 kHz in the standard mode, or four nonlinear 12-bit channels at 32 kHz in the alternate one — so nothing has been through a lossy encoder before this point. That makes the WMA a clean first-generation encode rather than a re-compression of already-damaged audio, and at 128–192 kbps it is transparent to most listeners. If you want zero loss, extract to DV to WAV instead, which writes the samples out unencoded.

Should I pick WMA v1 or WMA v2?

WMA v2, which is already selected. It is the revised standard encoder that superseded the original and is what any reasonably modern Windows Media stack expects, and it is more efficient at every bitrate. WMA v1 is the 1999 original, kept here only for hardware old enough to have shipped before v2 existed. If a device refuses to play a v2 file, dropping to v1 is worth a try — otherwise there is no reason to choose it.

What does the default Quality Preset actually give me?

More than you want. The dropdown opens on Highest, and the preset scale asks for the top of the codec's supported bitrate range rather than a fixed number — and the encoder then overshoots that request substantially at the high end. The result is a file several times larger than a camcorder soundtrack justifies, with no audible improvement. Either step the preset down to High or Medium, or switch to Custom Bitrate and type 128 or 192. That is the setting almost everyone actually wants.

Will my .wma file play outside Windows?

Often not, and never in a browser. Native support is essentially a Windows and Windows Media Player story. VLC and foobar2000 decode WMA on any platform, and a fair number of DLNA servers and 2000s-era car stereos handle it, but Apple's Music app, most phones, and web browsers do not. If the file needs to play somewhere you cannot test in advance, DV to MP3 is the safer target by a wide margin.

Why convert to WMA instead of MP3?

Compatibility with legacy Windows tooling, and not much else. Standard WMA has a modest edge over MP3 below about 64 kbps, and above 128 kbps the two are close enough that the choice comes down to what will open the file. Since MP3 opens everywhere and WMA opens on Windows, the deciding question is whether something specific in your workflow — a media library, a burning application, a device firmware — expects the .wma extension. If nothing does, choose MP3.

What should I set the Audio Sample Rate to?

Leave it on Original unless something is wrong. Original reads the rate from the DV stream and preserves it, which is correct whether your tape used the 48 kHz standard mode or the 32 kHz four-channel mode, and the WMA encoder accepts every rate in the dropdown without substitution. Force 48000 Hz only when the extracted audio plays back at obviously the wrong speed or pitch, which happens when a capture chain wrote a mislabelled rate into the file header. The lower entries — 24000 Hz and below — are for deliberately downsampling speech, not for fixing anything.

Can I keep all four channels from a 12-bit DV recording?

No. Standard WMA v1 and v2 are two-channel codecs, so even before the DV side is considered there is nowhere to put four channels. The 12-bit DV mode carries two stereo pairs, usually a camera-microphone pair plus one dubbed on afterwards; this converter outputs the primary pair, following your Audio Channel setting. Splitting both pairs out needs a dedicated multi-track DV demuxer, and each pair would then be converted separately.

Does anything of the video survive the conversion?

No. This is an audio-only extraction: the picture is decoded, discarded, and never written. If you want the moving image as well, convert the whole clip with DV to MP4 for broad device support or DV to WebM for the web — both carry the soundtrack alongside the video. If you want a single still frame instead, DV to PNG grabs one.

What happens to my DV file, and how large a capture can I send?

Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. There is no per-file cap, but be realistic about the transfer: DV runs at a fixed 3.6 MB per second of tape regardless of what is on it, so an hour-long capture is roughly 13 GB. The Trim control shortens the output rather than the upload, so if you only need one passage, cutting the file down before you send it is what actually saves time. To split a reel you have already uploaded, the video cutter runs as a separate job.