Free online USM to XVID converter

What the USM format is

USM is a proprietary CRI Middleware video container used primarily for prerecorded scenes in console and PC games. It commonly stores interleaved video and audio streams, such as MPEG-2 video with ADX or HCA audio, and may use game-specific encryption or masking. Game publishers and developers create USM files through CRI Sofdec or related CRI Middleware tools; players usually encounter them inside a game's movie, data, or resource folders.

USM is not a normal consumer format: FFmpeg, VLC, and standard editors may fail to open it, especially when the file is encrypted or uses a game-specific variant. Extraction tools may require a decryption key from the game or an appropriate key file.

What the Xvid format is

Xvid is an MPEG-4 Part 2 video codec rather than a container. Xvid video is most often stored in an AVI file, commonly with MP3 audio, because AVI and Xvid are supported by many older televisions, media players, editing programs, and hardware devices.

Xvid produces substantially smaller files than uncompressed video and is suitable when compatibility with legacy MPEG-4 playback matters. It is less efficient than H.264 or newer codecs at comparable quality, so it is usually chosen for compatibility rather than maximum compression.

How to actually convert USM to Xvid

For a USM that the built-in converter accepts, use the converter on 101convert.com: upload the file, select Xvid as the output, start the conversion, and download the resulting file. No software installation is required. Encrypted game files or unusual USM variants may be rejected or may require extraction first.

For files that need local processing, use VGMToolbox's CRI USM extraction function, then FFmpeg. The exact menu name varies by VGMToolbox version, but the workflow is:

1. Make a backup of the original USM file.
2. Open VGMToolbox and choose its CRI USM or USM extraction tool.
3. Load the USM and select the option to deinterleave or extract its streams.
4. Save the extracted video stream, commonly as .m2v, and the audio stream, commonly as .adx or .hca. If the tool asks for an encryption key, obtain the key associated with that game; a generic key may not work.
5. Decode ADX or HCA audio to WAV with a compatible vgmstream build, for example vgmstream-cli -o audio.wav audio.adx. Use the extracted filename in place of audio.adx.
6. Encode the extracted video and decoded audio to an Xvid AVI with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i video.m2v -i audio.wav -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 -c:v libxvid -q:v 4 -vf format=yuv420p -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k -shortest output_xvid.avi

The -q:v 4 setting uses quality-based Xvid encoding; lower values generally produce higher quality and larger files. Use -q:v 3 or -q:v 5 if testing shows that a different size-quality balance is needed. If the extracted video already contains playable audio, omit the second -i, the second -map, and the audio-decoding step.

Quality and compatibility limitations

USM extraction and Xvid encoding are separate operations, so converting cannot restore quality already lost in the game's source video. Re-encoding introduces another generation of compression; keep the original USM and extracted streams for archival use.

Use format=yuv420p for the broadest hardware compatibility. Xvid AVI may not preserve subtitles, multiple audio tracks, alpha channels, unusual frame-rate metadata, or game-specific synchronization data. Check the output from start to finish, because a damaged or incorrectly decrypted USM can produce a file with missing frames, silent audio, or audio-video drift.