WMV to OGV converter
Drop in a WMV and get an OGV back. OGV is the usual choice for wikimedia Commons and other free-culture media archives. Your file never leaves your computer.
How to convert WMV to OGV
- 1 Drop your WMV .wmv file onto the page, or click to browse for it.
- 2 Set the quality, or leave the default, which keeps the file small without anything showing.
- 3 Convert. The work happens on your own machine, so how long it takes depends on your computer and the file.
- 4 Download the OGV, or add more files and do the whole set in one go.
Why convert WMV to OGV
- Completely patent free and open.
- Supported natively by Firefox and Chrome.
- Wikimedia Commons and other free-culture media archives.
- WMV: quality for the file size is far behind anything modern.
WMV compared with OGV
How the two formats differ on the things that decide whether a conversion is worth making.
| Property | WMV | OGV |
|---|---|---|
| File extension | .wmv | .ogv |
| Browser support | No browser support | Some browsers |
| Introduced | 1999 | 2004 |
| Developed by | Microsoft | Xiph.Org Foundation |
| Standard | Proprietary | Open |
Quality and what changes
Both formats are lossy, so this is a second generation of compression: the WMV is decoded back to pixels that already carry its artefacts, and OGV then compresses that. The damage compounds rather than cancelling out, which is why repeated round trips visibly degrade an image. Encode at a higher quality than the source used, and convert once from the best copy you have rather than from an already converted file.
- WMV files can be read here but not created, so conversions run one way only.
- Files protected with DRM cannot be decoded and will fail rather than convert.
- One OGV limitation to keep in mind: quality for the file size is well behind MP4 or WebM.
Questions about WMV to OGV
Will converting WMV to OGV lose quality?
A little. Both formats are lossy, so the file is decoded and compressed a second time and the two sets of artefacts add up. At a high quality setting the difference is hard to see, but avoid repeated round trips between lossy formats.
Is my WMV file uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole thing runs inside the browser tab you already have open. Your WMV is read straight from your own disk, converted on your machine and handed back as an OGV. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored and there is no account.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no server-side limit because no server sees the file. The real ceiling is your device memory, since the input and the output both have to fit in the tab. A few hundred megabytes is usually fine on a desktop machine and considerably less on a phone.
Can I convert several WMV files at once?
Yes. Add as many as you like and they are processed one after another, then offered as separate OGV downloads or as a single ZIP. Speed depends on your own processor rather than on a queue.
Does the converter work offline?
Yes, after the page has loaded once. The engine is cached by the browser, so you can disconnect, reload and keep converting. That falls out of doing the work locally rather than being a separate mode you switch on.