WTV to WEBA Converter

How to Convert WTV to WEBA Online

1. Upload Your WTV File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to load .wtv recordings from a Windows Media Center backup, an old HTPC, or an external drive. Batch upload is supported — queue an entire season of recorded shows in one pass. Files process on our servers; nothing is stored after you leave.
2. Pick a Quality Preset (or Custom Bitrate): Default is Highest. Drop to High, Medium, Low, or Lowest for smaller files, switch to Custom Bitrate with Constant Bitrate (e.g., 128 kbps for music, 64 kbps for talk) or Variable Bitrate for better quality per MB, or use Specific file size to target an exact MB cap.
3. Tune Channels, Sample Rate, and Trim (Optional): Set Audio Channel to Mono (halves size for talk-radio recordings or news segments), pick an Audio Sample Rate (48000 Hz is WebM's native rate; 44100 Hz matches CD audio; 16000 Hz is voice-grade), or Trim to isolate a single segment of a long recording — useful for grabbing one song from a recorded concert.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and grab each .weba file individually or as a ZIP. No sign-up, no watermark, no email gate.

Why Convert WTV to WEBA?

WTV (Windows Recorded TV Show) is the proprietary container Windows Media Center used to save live-TV recordings, replacing the older DVR-MS format in the 2008 TV Pack update. WTV is a video container — MPEG-2 video plus AC-3 or MP2 audio — and Microsoft retired Media Center entirely in Windows 10 (2015), leaving millions of .wtv archives stranded on old HTPCs and external drives. Extracting the audio into WEBA (a WebM container holding Opus or Vorbis audio, MIME audio/webm) gives you a small, royalty-free, browser-native file that plays in every modern browser without a media player install. Typical uses:

• Salvage talk-show or news recordings as podcast-friendly audio — A 30-minute WTV news segment at MPEG-2 video bitrates is hundreds of megabytes; the extracted Opus-in-WebM track at 64 kbps lands around 14 MB and plays inline in any HTML5 <audio> tag.
• Archive recorded radio or concert broadcasts — Media Center could capture FM radio and TV music programming. Extracting to WEBA at 96–128 kbps Opus preserves transparent quality at ~30–60% of an MP3's size, ideal for long-term storage.
• Web-publish historical recordings — WEBA is the audio-only sibling of WebM; it plays directly in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Safari's HTML5 audio support for the WebM container is partial and version-dependent, so keep an MP3 fallback if iOS/macOS users are in scope.
• Drop the video weight — A two-hour WTV file is often 4–8 GB. The audio-only WEBA is two or three orders of magnitude smaller, perfect for offline listening on a phone.
• Feed open-source pipelines — Discord, WebRTC, Jitsi, and most game engines speak Opus natively; WEBA drops straight in without a transcode hop.
• Replace AC-3 with a license-free codec — AC-3 (Dolby Digital) requires a patent license to redistribute in many contexts; Vorbis and Opus are royalty-free under BSD-style licenses.

Need the video too? Try WTV to MP4 or WTV to WebM. Prefer a different audio format? See WTV to MP3 or WTV to Opus. Already have a WEBA you want to trim? Use the Audio Cutter.

WTV vs WEBA — Format Comparison

Opus vs Vorbis Inside WEBA — Which to Pick

Both codecs live inside the audio/webm container and play in the same browsers, but they target different bitrate ranges. Opus, standardized as IETF RFC 6716 in September 2012 and added to the WebM spec in 2013, outperforms Vorbis at every bitrate tested by Xiph and is the default for new WebM audio.

Opus also has 5–26.5 ms latency (vs hundreds of ms for Vorbis), which is why WebRTC, Discord, and Google Meet all mandate it. For a static file you'll re-play later, latency doesn't matter — quality-per-MB does, and Opus wins there too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is a .weba file, and why is the extension different from .webm?

.weba is a convention for an audio-only WebM file. The underlying container is the same Matroska-derived WebM format, and the MIME type stays audio/webm, but some operating systems and tools use .weba to signal there is no video stream inside. The W3C/WebM Project officially recognises only .webm; .weba is a popular but unofficial extension used by Firefox's "Save audio as…" and several converter tools. Browsers play both extensions identically.

Why convert WTV instead of just keeping the original?

Windows Media Center was discontinued in Windows 10 (2015), and Microsoft disbanded the Media Center development team after Windows 7 (2009). .wtv is a proprietary container with shrinking tool support — most modern media players need extra codec packs (or fail entirely) on the MPEG-2 / AC-3 streams inside. Extracting the audio to WEBA gives you a royalty-free, browser-native file that will keep playing in 20 years without any special software.

Will my recording's broadcast-flag DRM cause problems?

WTV files captured from cable boxes with the CableCARD copy-once or copy-never flag set were encrypted by Media Center and won't decode in third-party tools. If your .wtv opens in VLC or FFmpeg, it's clear and converts fine. If those tools error with "encrypted stream" or similar, your only option is to play it back on a Windows machine that still has the original Media Center licence.

Should I pick Opus or Vorbis for the output?

Pick Opus unless you have a specific reason not to — it's newer, sounds better at every bitrate Xiph has tested, and plays natively in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Pick Vorbis only if you're targeting a legacy player or game engine pipeline that doesn't yet speak Opus (some pre-2018 Unity/Godot setups, certain Roku and smart-TV firmwares). Safari's WebM-audio support is partial regardless of codec, so if you need an Apple-friendly file, convert to MP3 or AAC instead.

What sample rate should I use?

WebM's native rate is 48000 Hz — Opus internally upsamples or downsamples to 48 kHz regardless of input, so picking 48000 Hz avoids a redundant resample. Use 44100 Hz only if you need bit-exact compatibility with CD-rate downstream tools. Drop to 16000 Hz for talk-only content (it doesn't shrink Opus much because the codec already band-limits voice, but it does shrink Vorbis).

How much smaller is WEBA than the original WTV?

A typical 1-hour HD WTV recording is 2–4 GB (MPEG-2 video at 8–15 Mbps plus AC-3 audio at 192–384 kbps). The extracted Opus-in-WEBA at 96 kbps is roughly 43 MB — a 50× to 100× reduction. Even at 192 kbps Opus (audibly indistinguishable from the source AC-3 for any non-critical use), you're around 86 MB per hour.

Will the WEBA play in iMessage, WhatsApp, or Apple Mail?

Mostly no. MDN's audio-codec compatibility table currently lists Safari as not playing Vorbis or Opus inside the WebM container (Safari's Opus playback is only supported in the CAF and MP4 containers, not WebM). That means audio/webm files often won't preview inline in iMessage, Apple Mail, or Safari-rendered WhatsApp Web on iOS/macOS. If your recipient is on Apple hardware, route through WEBA → MP3 or convert WTV → MP3 directly. Android, Chrome OS, Windows, and Linux play WEBA without issue.

Can I trim the recording to grab just one segment?

Yes. Expand Trim in Advanced Options, set the start time and duration in HH:MM:SS.mmm format, and only that slice is encoded. Useful for pulling a single song from a recorded concert or a single news story from an hour-long broadcast — much faster than re-encoding the whole file and trimming afterwards.

Does the converter keep the original WTV metadata (show title, channel, recording date)?

WTV stores extensive EPG metadata (show name, episode title, channel, recording timestamp), but WebM's metadata model (SimpleTag inside Matroska) doesn't map one-to-one. Show title and recording date carry over as TITLE and DATE_RECORDED tags where present; channel call signs and EPG synopses are dropped. If you need them, export the EPG separately before conversion using a Windows-side utility.