MPEG-2 to FLAC Converter

MPEG-2 Audio vs FLAC — What You Actually Gain

The honest short answer first, because most pages about this conversion get it wrong: FLAC cannot restore anything your MPEG-2 file already threw away. FLAC is lossless with respect to what you hand it, not with respect to the original studio master. If the soundtrack inside your .mpeg2 is MP2 or AC-3 — which it almost always is, because that is what DVD-Video and DVB broadcast use — then converting to FLAC freezes that already-lossy audio perfectly and permanently. That is genuinely useful, and it is a different thing from "recovering" quality.

Where FLAC earns its place is as a stable, verifiable archive: every later copy, edit and re-encode starts from the same samples instead of stacking one lossy generation on top of another. And in the one case where an MPEG-2 file carries LPCM audio, the conversion really is a clean, complete transfer of the sample data.

Side by Side

When FLAC Is the Right Target

• You are archiving a soundtrack, interview, concert or lecture off a DVD or recorder and want one copy that never degrades again.
• You intend to edit the audio — cut, level, denoise, re-mix — and want each save to be free of a new generation of lossy artefacts.
• You will produce several derivative formats later (MP3 for a phone, AAC for a video) and want a single clean master to encode from.
• Your MPEG-2 file carries LPCM audio, in which case FLAC stores the same samples in roughly half the space.

When It Isn't

• You just want the audio on a phone or in a car. FLAC files are several times larger than an MP3 of the same recording, and the extra size buys you nothing if the source was lossy anyway — MPEG-2 to MP3 is the smaller answer.
• You need a format an old car stereo or a DAW's stock importer will definitely open; WAV is the safer universal choice.
• You want the video too. This page discards the picture and keeps only the audio track.

How to Convert MPEG-2 to FLAC

1. Upload Your MPEG-2 File: Drag the .mpg, .mpeg or .mpeg2 file onto the page or click "Add Files." Several files can be queued and processed with the same settings.
2. Set the Compression Level: Open Advanced Options. The slider runs from 1 to 12 and controls encoding effort only — a higher number means a smaller file and a slower encode, with byte-identical audio either way.
3. Adjust Audio Channel, Sample Rate or Trim (Optional): Audio Channel and Audio Sample Rate both start on ORIGINAL, which is what you want for an archive. Trim takes a Start time and a Duration if you only need one passage.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

What Is Actually Inside Your MPEG-2 File

An MPEG program stream is a wrapper; the audio inside it can be any of four things, and which one you have decides what FLAC is worth to you.

Note that only one audio track survives the conversion, and there is no track picker on this page. Selection is automatic and follows ffmpeg's documented rule: the audio stream with the most channels wins, and ties are broken by the lowest stream index. On a disc that carries a 5.1 AC-3 track alongside a stereo commentary, the 5.1 track is the one you will get.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting MPEG-2 to FLAC improve the audio quality?

No. Nothing can rebuild detail that a lossy encoder already discarded, and the MP2 or AC-3 track inside a DVD-era MPEG-2 file is lossy. What FLAC does is stop the erosion: from the moment you have the FLAC, no further generation loss accumulates no matter how many times you edit, copy or re-encode it. Treat the conversion as preservation, not restoration — any tool that promises "pure, unaltered sound" from a lossy source is overselling it.

What does the Compression level slider actually change?

File size and encoding time, and nothing else. FLAC is lossless at every setting, so level 1 and level 12 decode to identical samples — level 12 simply spends more CPU searching for a tighter prediction model. We ship the slider at 12, the top of its range, where ffmpeg's own FLAC encoder defaults to 5; drop it if you are converting a long recording and would rather have the file sooner than have it a few percent smaller.

How much bigger will the FLAC be than the original audio?

Usually several times the size of the lossy track it came from, because you are storing a lossless representation of a lossy decode. A 192 kbit/s MP2 track expands to whatever FLAC needs for that waveform, commonly in the 400–1,000 kbit/s range for stereo music and lower for speech. Against uncompressed audio the picture flips: FLAC typically lands near half the size of the equivalent WAV.

Can I get 5.1 surround into the FLAC?

FLAC itself supports 1 to 8 channels, so a multichannel result is possible in principle, and automatic stream selection will pick your 5.1 track over a stereo one. What you should not expect is Dolby Digital's metadata — dialogue normalisation, downmix coefficients, dynamic-range control — to survive, because those are AC-3 features with no FLAC equivalent. If you want a guaranteed two-channel result, set Audio Channel to STEREO before converting.

Which sample rate should I choose?

Leave Audio Sample Rate on ORIGINAL. DVD-Video audio is 48 kHz (96 kHz for some LPCM and DTS tracks), and resampling it to 44100 Hz to look more like a CD is a lossy arithmetic step that gains you nothing — FLAC is perfectly happy storing 48 kHz. The lower rates in the list (8000 to 24000 Hz) exist for speech-sized files and will audibly dull music.

Why did I get audio from the wrong language track?

Because there is no track selector here and the automatic rule is channel count, not language. A disc with an English 5.1 track and a French stereo track will give you the English one; a disc where the commentary is the 5.1 track will give you the commentary. If the track you want is not the one with the most channels, demux it in a desktop tool before uploading.

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

Yes — use Trim on this page, which takes a Start time and a Duration and applies before encoding, so you are not waiting on a two-hour file to convert. If you would rather cut the video first and convert afterwards, the video cutter accepts MPEG-2 directly. The audio cutter does not take video files, so trimming has to happen either here or on the video side.

Is FLAC a real standard, or just a popular open-source project?

Both. FLAC came out of the Xiph.Org Foundation as free software, and in December 2024 the IETF published it as RFC 9639, which specifies the bitstream formally: 1 to 8 channels, sample rates from 1 Hz to 1,048,575 Hz, and 4 to 32 bits per sample. That matters for archiving, because a documented, royalty-free format with multiple independent decoders is exactly what you want a long-term master to be stored in.

What happens to my file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours, along with the FLAC we generated. There is no sign-up and no watermark. Since a two-hour MPEG-2 rip can be several gigabytes, the slow part of this job is usually the upload rather than the encode.