MOV to OGA Converter

MOV to OGA Converter

A QuickTime .mov from a Mac, an iPhone or a screen recorder carries a video track and an audio track; this page throws away the picture and re-encodes the sound into an Ogg audio file with the .oga extension. OGA is not a codec — it is the Ogg container (RFC 3533, May 2003) with the extension that RFC 5334 reserves for audio-only Ogg streams. What ends up inside it is your choice of Vorbis, Opus, Speex or FLAC, and that choice, not the extension, decides how the file sounds and where it plays.

How to Convert MOV to OGA

1. Upload Your MOV File: Drag the .mov onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse for it. Several clips can be queued and run with the same settings; each is uploaded over an encrypted connection and converted on our servers.
2. Pick the Audio Codec: Open the advanced options and set Audio Codec — Vorbis is preselected, with Opus, Speex and FLAC as the alternatives. Vorbis is the safe default for music and general playback; Opus is the better modern choice for speech.
3. Choose a File Compression Mode: Quality Preset, Specific file size, Custom Bitrate, Constant Bitrate and Variable Bitrate are all offered. None of them is preselected — the Preset dropdown simply displays "Highest" as its first entry, and if you leave the whole group untouched the server falls back to its middle quality tier, so choose deliberately.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .oga. Audio Channel, Audio Sample Rate and Trim stay on their original values unless you change them. No sign-up, no watermark; files are removed from our servers automatically after a few hours.

The OGA Extension at a Glance

Choosing What Goes Inside the OGA

Settings That Do Not Behave the Way the Dropdown Implies

Four combinations on this page resolve differently from what the control suggests. None of them fails — they silently produce something other than the literal reading:

• The 384K entry under Variable Bitrate. Vorbis's variable-bitrate ladder here tops out at 320K, which maps to libvorbis quality 10. Picking 384K falls off that ladder, so the value is parsed as a plain 384 kbps target and then clamped to Vorbis's 320 kbps ceiling — you get a 320 kbps average-bitrate encode rather than a quality-mode one.
• Variable Bitrate with Opus or Speex selected. The variable-bitrate ladder on this page is Vorbis's. With Opus or Speex chosen it resolves to a libvorbis quality flag those encoders do not read, so the setting has no effect. Use Constant Bitrate or Custom Bitrate with those two codecs.
• 44100 Hz with Opus. libopus encodes only at 8, 12, 16, 24 and 48 kHz. Selecting 44100 Hz makes our pipeline snap the rate to the nearest supported value, which is 48 kHz — the number in the dropdown is not what lands in the file.
• Speex and the sample rate list. With Speex selected, "Original" disappears from Audio Sample Rate and only 8000 Hz and 16000 Hz remain, so a 48 kHz soundtrack is forced down to narrowband or wideband speech rates. That is by design for a speech codec, but it is not reversible.
• Any bitrate control with FLAC. FLAC is lossless, so the bitrate you type is discarded and replaced by a compression level on a 0–12 scale. Higher levels mean smaller files and slower encoding, never lower fidelity.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OGA the same thing as OGG?

The bytes are the same family; the extension is a labelling convention. RFC 5334 registers .oga as the general extension for audio-only Ogg streams served as audio/ogg, and keeps .ogg for files that hold nothing but a Vorbis bitstream, purely for backward compatibility with older players. Renaming one to the other changes nothing inside the file. If your target system insists on the three-letter form, use MOV to OGG instead — the same codecs and controls are on that page.

Will I lose quality pulling the audio out of a MOV?

Some, unless you choose FLAC. The audio in a .mov is almost always AAC, and our server always re-encodes rather than copying the stream, so Vorbis, Opus and Speex output is a lossy-to-lossy generation. At 128 kbps or above that second generation is usually inaudible. FLAC is the exception: it stores the decoded samples bit-exactly, so nothing further is lost — though it cannot recover anything the original AAC encoder already discarded.

Which codec should I put in an OGA — Vorbis or Opus?

Above roughly 96 kbps the two are close enough that Vorbis's broader player support makes it the safer pick, and it is what is preselected here. Below that — voice memos, interview recordings, lecture capture — Opus is clearly better per kilobit, which is why the IETF standardised it in RFC 6716 for exactly that range. Both are royalty-free, so the decision is only about target size and where the file has to play.

Does an OGA file play on an iPhone or in Safari?

Safari gained partial Ogg Vorbis support at 14.1 and full support at 18.4, which puts Ogg Vorbis playback at about 95% of global browser usage. Older Apple software and the stock iOS Files preview are the remaining gap, and no version of QuickTime Player has ever handled Ogg natively. VLC plays all four codecs on every platform. If you need something that opens everywhere without thinking about it, convert to MOV to MP3 instead.

Why did my 384 kbps Vorbis file come out at 320 kbps?

Because libvorbis's quality ladder ends at 320 kbps and our encoder clamps anything above that to the ceiling. The 384K entry in the Variable Bitrate list is not a Vorbis quality step, so it is treated as a plain bitrate target and then reduced. If you genuinely need a higher rate, choose Opus (which the specification takes to 510 kbit/s) or FLAC, where rate control does not apply at all.

Can I extract just one section of the MOV instead of the whole soundtrack?

Yes — use the Trim control on this page, which takes a start time and a duration in either seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss form, and only that span is encoded. Do not send the .mov to our audio cutter; that tool takes audio files, not video. To cut the video first and convert afterwards, use Video Cutter.

What happens to the video track and the metadata?

The video track is discarded entirely — an OGA holds only audio. Track-level tags such as title and artist are not carried over from a QuickTime movie in any reliable way, and chapter markers, timecode and any embedded subtitle track are lost, because none of them has an equivalent in an audio-only Ogg stream. Keep the original .mov if that material matters.

Is my file private, and how long do you keep it?

Your .mov is uploaded over an encrypted connection and converted on our servers; the upload and the finished .oga are both deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no sign-up and no watermark is added. The practical size limit is upload time rather than anything else, so trimming a long recording before uploading is the fastest route.

Should I pick FLAC inside an OGA or just download a .flac file?

Pick FLAC here if a system specifically wants the Ogg container — Ogg FLAC and native FLAC are different framings of the same codec, and a few players read only one of them. If you have no such requirement, the standalone MOV to FLAC output is the more widely recognised file. Either way the audio is lossless relative to what was decoded out of the MOV.