WTV to AV1 Converter

How to Convert WTV to AV1 Online

1. Upload Your WTV File: Drag and drop your .wtv recording, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Batch uploads are supported, so an entire season of recorded broadcasts can be queued at once.
2. Pick a Quality Preset or Bitrate: Open Advanced Options. The default Quality Preset "Very High (Recommended)" maps to a low AV1 CRF for near-source quality. Pick Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Very High, or Highest for one-click tradeoffs, or switch to Constant Bitrate / Variable Bitrate / Constant Quality / Constraint Quality / Specific file size for explicit control. AV1's CRF (Constant Quality) range is 0-63 — lower numbers mean higher quality and larger files.
3. Resize, Trim, or Keep Original (Optional): Use Video resolution to choose Keep original, a Preset Resolution (2160p, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, 240p), Width-only or Height-only with aspect lock, exact Width x Height, or scale by Resolution Percentage. Use Trim → Time Range to clip out commercial breaks before re-encoding (AV1 is slow; trimming first saves real time).
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Files process on our edge servers and download with no watermark, no account, and no upload to long-lived storage.

Why Convert WTV to AV1?

WTV is Microsoft's container for over-the-air, cable, and ClearQAM recordings made by Windows Media Center, which shipped with Windows 7 and was discontinued in Windows 10 in 2015. The files wrap MPEG-2 (or sometimes MPEG-4 / H.264) video with AC-3 or MPEG-1 Layer II audio, plus EPG metadata and, on some recordings, broadcast-flag DRM. Outside Media Center and a few players like VLC, WTV is effectively a dead end. AV1, finalized by the Alliance for Open Media on June 25, 2018, is the modern opposite: royalty-free, open, and roughly 30% more efficient than HEVC at matched quality. Re-encoding a 30 GB MPEG-2 broadcast recording into AV1 at visually-lossless settings typically yields a 4-8 GB file that plays in any current browser.

• Free the recording from Media Center — Windows 11 has no path to play .wtv natively; AV1 in an MP4 or MKV plays in Windows 11's stock Media Player, the Files app preview, and any current browser.
• Shrink a DVR archive by 5-10x — broadcast MPEG-2 at 15-19 Mbps compresses to AV1 around 2-4 Mbps with no visible loss for typical sitcom and news content, so a 2 TB Media Center library fits on a 256 GB SSD or in modest cloud storage.
• Stream to a smart TV or stick — recent Roku, Google TV, Fire TV 4K Max, Apple TV 4K (A15+), and most 2022+ LG/Samsung TVs decode AV1 in hardware; WTV doesn't ship a DLNA profile at all.
• Edit recorded TV in modern NLEs — DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut import AV1 cleanly; none of them ingest WTV without a transcode step.
• Archive interview, lecture, or news clips — AV1's filesize-per-quality is currently the best of any widely-supported codec, making it the obvious choice for long-term storage of recordings you'll keep for a decade.
• Re-publish to YouTube, Vimeo, or Bilibili — all three already stream AV1; uploading AV1 sources avoids a quality-degrading intermediate transcode.

WTV vs AV1 — Format Comparison

AV1 Quality Preset Guide

CRF 23 in AV1 is roughly the perceptual equivalent of CRF 18 in x265 and CRF 18 in x264. AV1 is computationally expensive — expect encodes 5-20x slower than wall-clock playback depending on preset; trimming first is the single biggest win.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why doesn't Windows 11 play my WTV files?

Windows Media Center was discontinued with the release of Windows 10 in 2015 and is not available on Windows 11. The codecs and the container parser shipped with Media Center, not Windows itself, so a fresh Windows 11 install has no native WTV decoder. VLC still plays WTV reliably; for native Windows 11 playback you need to re-container or re-encode. Converting to AV1 in an MP4 wrapper makes the recording playable in the stock Windows 11 Media Player app, the Photos preview, Edge, and every other modern browser.

Will my WTV's program guide, episode title, and captions survive the conversion?

The video and the burned-in captions (CC1 line-21 in MPEG-2 broadcasts) carry over. The XML program-guide metadata embedded in WTV — channel, episode synopsis, ratings — does not have an equivalent in MP4 or MKV and is dropped during transcode. If you need to keep show metadata, copy it from Media Center's WMC database (%ProgramData%\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\TempRec\TempSBE) into the MP4's title/description fields after conversion, or rename the file using the title and air date.

Why is AV1 so slow to encode compared to my WTV file's size shrink?

AV1's bitstream allows far more partition shapes, prediction modes, and transform variants than HEVC or H.264, which is exactly why it compresses better — but the encoder has to search all of them. Even with libaom-av1's good preset, encoding a 1080p stream runs roughly 5-20x slower than real-time on a modern desktop CPU. SVT-AV1 (used in many fast pipelines) cuts that 2-4x. For multi-hour WTV recordings, the practical advice is: trim out commercials first, drop to 1080p if the source is 1080i, and let the encoder run overnight.

Should I pick AV1 or H.265 (HEVC) for a long archive?

For pure file-size-per-quality, AV1 wins by roughly 30% at matched perceptual quality. AV1 is also royalty-free, which matters for re-publishing. HEVC's only practical advantage today is broader hardware decode on devices made between 2015 and 2022. If your playback targets are 2022-or-newer (Apple TV 4K with A15+, M3 Macs, A17 Pro iPhones, recent smart TVs, current browsers), pick AV1. If you need to play on a 2017 mid-tier laptop or a 2019 budget TV, HEVC's wider hardware support may still matter — try the WTV to MKV workflow with HEVC instead.

Does my recording have DRM that will block re-encoding?

If your WTV came from a CableCARD tuner on a "protected" cable channel, Media Center marked it with the broadcast flag and the file is sealed to the recording PC's playback chain — VLC and most converters will refuse it or extract a blank stream. Recordings from ATSC over-the-air antennas and unencrypted ClearQAM cable are unprotected and convert cleanly. You can check by trying to play the WTV in VLC on a different machine first: if it plays, it converts. If it shows "DRM-protected content," conversion is blocked at the source.

What's the best output container for AV1 — MP4 or MKV?

MP4 with AV1 video and AAC or Opus audio is the most broadly compatible — every current browser, Apple device, Android device, and stock OS player will read it. MKV supports more audio tracks, subtitle tracks, and chapter metadata, which matters when your WTV had multilingual audio or you want to keep chapter marks at commercial breaks. xconvert outputs an MP4 wrapper by default for AV1; if you need MKV specifically, route through WTV to MKV and pick AV1 as the video codec.

My WTV is 1080i (interlaced). Will the AV1 output have combing artifacts?

Broadcast HD in the US is typically 1080i60 (interlaced) for sports and news, 720p60 for some networks, and 1080p24 only on streaming. If the source is interlaced, encoding to AV1 without deinterlacing first will preserve the interlace fields and modern progressive-scan displays will show combing during motion. The xconvert converter applies a standard deinterlace pass when the source is detected as interlaced; the output is a clean progressive 1080p. If you'd rather keep frame rate exact, encode to 1080p60 (deinterlaced to progressive at 60 fps) rather than 1080p30.

Can I batch-convert a whole season of WTV episodes at once?

Yes — drop all the files into the uploader and they share the same Quality Preset and resolution settings. Each runs through the AV1 encoder serially; expect a multi-hour overnight job for a 12-episode 1-hour-each season. Browser-based encoding holds state in the tab, so the window has to stay open; if you need to close the tab, queue the next batch when you reopen. Related conversions worth knowing: WTV to MP4 (H.264 in MP4, much faster encode if AV1 isn't required) and WTV to AVI (legacy compatibility).

What playback device do I need to actually watch AV1?

For software playback: any computer or phone from the last five years running Chrome 70+, Firefox 67+, Edge 121+, or VLC. Safari supports AV1 only on iOS 17 / macOS Sonoma and later, and only on M3 / A17 Pro hardware (it falls back to software decode elsewhere, which is choppy). For TV playback: Roku Ultra (2022+), Fire TV 4K Max, Apple TV 4K (3rd-gen / A15+), Chromecast with Google TV (4K), most 2022+ LG OLED and Samsung QLED sets, and Nvidia Shield TV Pro (2019) all decode AV1 in hardware. Older smart TVs may transcode through Plex or Jellyfin instead.