Free online USM to OGG converter

What the USM format is

USM is a CRI Middleware video container used for prerendered cutscenes, trailers, menus, and other movie assets in video games. Game publishers commonly create it with CRIWARE tools, and the files are often found in a game's data or movie directory. A USM may contain interleaved video streams and CRI audio such as HCA, so it is not equivalent to a normal audio file.

What the OGG format is

OGG is a multimedia container most commonly used with Vorbis or Opus audio. Ogg Vorbis is supported by many desktop players, game engines, and audio tools; Opus generally provides better quality at low bitrates but may have narrower support in older software. OGG is appropriate when you need audio only, not a video container.

How to actually convert USM to OGG

For a quick conversion without installing software, use the converter on 101convert.com: upload the USM file, select OGG as the output format, start the conversion, and download the result if the file contains a supported audio stream. Large game files may take longer to upload, and encrypted or unusual USM variants may not be accepted.

For local conversion and difficult files, extract the streams first, then encode the extracted audio:

1. Make a backup of the original USM and work on a copy.
2. Use a USM-capable extractor such as USM Deinterleaver or the relevant extraction tools in VGMToolbox. The output may include a video file and an HCA audio file.
3. If the extractor produces HCA, decode it with vgmstream-cli, which is designed for game audio formats: vgmstream-cli -o extracted.wav extracted.hca.
4. Encode the WAV as Ogg Vorbis with FFmpeg: ffmpeg -i extracted.wav -c:a libvorbis -q:a 5 output.ogg. A quality value of 5 is a practical general setting; values from 0 to 10 trade file size against quality.
5. Check the result with a player such as VLC and confirm the duration, channels, and beginning and end of the track.

If the extractor already outputs WAV, skip the HCA decoding step. FFmpeg generally cannot open every CRI USM variant directly, so trying ffmpeg -i video.usm output.ogg may fail even when the audio can be extracted with a dedicated USM tool.

Quality, compatibility, and limitations

USM audio is often already compressed, commonly with HCA. Encoding it again as Vorbis is a lossy-to-lossy conversion and cannot restore quality removed by the source codec. Use -q:a 7 or a higher value when retaining more detail matters, or use a lossless intermediate only to avoid additional losses during editing; OGG Vorbis itself remains lossy.

Some USM files are encrypted, contain no audio, or use an audio variant that a particular extractor cannot decode. An audio-only OGG cannot retain subtitles, video, chapter data, or the exact game playback behavior. If the intended result is the complete cutscene, extract or convert the video to a format such as MP4 or WebM instead.