MPG to WMV Converter

Convert MPG to WMV: What This Tutorial Covers

MPG is an MPEG program stream — MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video with an interleaved audio track, the format of VCD, DVD and digital-TV captures. WMV is Microsoft's side of the same era. Microsoft's own documentation defines the output precisely: "The extension wma or wmv is used to specify an ASF file that contains content encoded with the Windows Media Audio and/or Windows Media Video codecs." This tutorial covers the four settings that matter on this page, then the one control that will quietly ruin your output if you treat it like an H.264 slider — the box labelled CRF, which on a WMV codec is not a CRF at all.

How to Convert MPG to WMV

1. Upload Your MPG File: Drag and drop the .mpg or .mpeg file onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.
2. Leave Video Codec on WMV 2 and Audio Codec on WMA v2: Those are the defaults for a .wmv target and the right answer almost every time. WMV 1 and WMA v1 are the earlier generation of each, worse at the same bitrate, and only worth picking for software old enough to reject the newer ones.
3. Choose a Rate-Control Mode Under File Compression: The page starts in Quality Preset with Very High (Recommended) selected, which scales the source's own bitrate. If you want direct control, Constraint Quality is the mode to use on WMV — and read the walk-through below before touching its numeric box.
4. Set Video Resolution and Trim, Then Convert: Keep original is preselected under Video resolution; use Width x Height if the source is anamorphic. Trim takes a Start time and Duration. Click Convert and download the .wmv.

Walk-through: the Box Labelled "CRF" Is Really a Quantizer

This is the single most useful thing to know about this page. WMV 1 and WMV 2 have no constant-rate-factor mode. When you pick Constant Quality or Constraint Quality, our encoder emits a qscale value instead — ffmpeg's -q:v — on a 1 to 31 scale where lower is better. The box is labelled CRF because the same control is shared with H.264 and H.265 pages, and it opens at 23, which is the sensible mid-point for x264 and a genuinely bad setting here.

The control absolutely works. It is just measured in the opposite direction from what the label implies, and its starting value sits near the bottom of the quality range rather than the middle.

Practical patterns:

• Want it to look like the DVD? Constraint Quality, value 3, and set Max bitrate to something generous such as 6 Mbps.
• Want a predictable file size? Skip quality mode entirely — Constant Bitrate or Specific file size solve for size directly.
• Do not know? Leave Quality Preset on Very High. On a video source it scales the incoming bitrate, so a DVD-rate MPG produces a comparable-rate WMV without you choosing a number at all.

The Six Rate-Control Modes

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "Quality got worse when I switched to Constant Quality." The numeric box opened at 23 on a scale where 1 is best. Set it to 3–5.
• "It looks blocky even at the highest settings." WMV 1 and WMV 2 are turn-of-the-century codecs; there is no Windows Media Video 9 / VC-1 encoder on this page. Below roughly 1 Mbps at standard definition they block up in a way modern encoders do not. If the output has to look good, MPG to MP4 gives you H.264 instead.
• "Fine horizontal lines through anything that moves." That is interlacing, present in most MPEG-2 from DVD, camcorders and broadcast. Nothing in this pipeline deinterlaces, so the comb pattern is carried into the WMV as picture content. Deinterlace in an editor first if it matters.
• "Everyone looks too narrow." Anamorphic widescreen. DVD-Video stores 16:9 material inside a 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL) pixel grid and relies on the player to stretch it; our resize path does not apply that display flag. Set Width x Height explicitly to 854×480 or 1024×576.
• "Black bars appeared down the sides." You asked for a Width x Height whose shape differs from the source, so the frame was fitted inside it and the spare area filled. On a video source that fill is black and there is no colour control for it — pick dimensions matching the source aspect instead.
• "My 5.1 soundtrack came out in stereo." WMA v1 and WMA v2 are limited to two channels here, so a Dolby Digital or DTS surround track is downmixed. Nothing on this page preserves discrete surround.

When This Doesn't Work

WMV is a compatibility target, not a quality target, and there are jobs it simply cannot do. There is no VC-1 / Windows Media Video 9 encoder available, so you cannot produce the later WMV variant some Windows software expects. This page also exposes no audio bitrate, channel or sample-rate controls — the audio codec choice is all you get, so if you need a specific audio rate, extract the soundtrack separately with MPG to WMA and remux in a desktop tool. And if the MPG came from a commercial disc with copy protection intact, decode it locally first; an encrypted VOB is not a file any converter can read. When the real goal is "make this old video play everywhere", the honest answer is MPG to MP4 rather than WMV.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the CRF box on this page not a real CRF?

Because WMV 1 and WMV 2 do not implement constant-rate-factor encoding. Our encoder detects the qscale-family codecs and emits -q:v instead, clamped to the 1–31 range that ffmpeg accepts. The control is shared across every codec's page, so the label and the opening value of 23 come from the H.264 world. On WMV, treat the number as a quantizer: lower is better, and 3–5 is the useful band.

Is WMV 2 the same as WMV 9 or VC-1?

No. This page offers WMV 1 and WMV 2 only — the two earlier Windows Media Video generations. The later Windows Media Video 9 codec, standardised as VC-1, is not available as an encoder here. Files produced on this page play in Windows Media Player and anything that reads ASF, but they are not VC-1 streams and will not satisfy software that specifically requires one.

Which quality mode should I actually use?

Constraint Quality, with the numeric value at 3 and a generous Max bitrate. It gives you quality-driven encoding — bits go where the picture needs them — while the ceiling stops a busy scene ballooning the file. Constant Quality does the same without the ceiling, which on grainy or high-motion DVD material can produce a surprisingly large file. If you would rather not think about it at all, Quality Preset on Very High scales the source bitrate and is a perfectly reasonable default for a video source.

Will converting to WMV make the file smaller than the MPG?

Usually yes, and often by a lot, because DVD-era MPEG-2 is deliberately generous with bits — the spec allows up to 9.8 Mbit/s for video so that cheap hardware decoders could keep up. Asking for a couple of Mbps from WMV 2 therefore cuts the file dramatically. How far you can push it is content-dependent, but a codec of this vintage degrades much faster than a modern one, so check the result before deleting the source rather than assuming a number is safe.

Can I convert only part of a long recording?

Yes. Use the Trim control on this page: set Start time and Duration, in plain seconds or as HH:MM:SS.sss, and only that span is encoded. On a multi-gigabyte DVD rip the slow part is the upload rather than the encode, so cutting the source down first with our Video Cutter and converting the short result is usually the faster route overall.

What resolution will the output be?

Whatever the source is, unless you change it — Keep original is preselected. Preset Resolutions sets the height and lets the width follow the source aspect, so it will not fix a squashed anamorphic picture; Width x Height is the control for that. Upscaling a 720×480 DVD frame to 1080p adds no detail and costs bitrate, so leave it alone unless a target device demands a specific size.

Does anything here fix the interlacing in old MPEG-2?

No, and it is better to know that up front. There is no deinterlacing step anywhere in this pipeline, so the two interleaved fields in each interlaced MPEG-2 frame are re-encoded exactly as they arrive and the comb pattern becomes part of the WMV's picture. On a progressive source — a film-sourced DVD, a screen capture, a modern camera — this never comes up. On interlaced camcorder or broadcast footage, deinterlace in a desktop editor before uploading.

How are my files handled while this runs?

The MPG is uploaded over an encrypted connection and re-encoded on our servers; both the upload and the finished .wmv are deleted automatically a few hours later. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and files are never shared or made public. Every conversion is a genuine re-encode — there is no stream-copy path, because MPEG-2 video cannot simply be relabelled as Windows Media Video inside an ASF file.