Free online WTV to MJPG converter

A video editor or playback device may require Motion JPEG instead of a Windows Media Center recording, and some workflows accept only an .mjpg file. Converting also makes individual frames easier to process, but MJPG normally produces much larger files than the source recording.

What the WTV format is

WTV is the Windows Recorded TV Show container used by Windows Media Center in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Media Center creates WTV files when recording television broadcasts, usually storing MPEG-2 or H.264 video together with audio, captions, program metadata, and sometimes broadcast copy-protection data.

You normally encounter WTV files in a Media Center recording folder or after transferring recordings from an older Windows television-tuner PC. The container itself does not guarantee that every stream can be decoded: DRM-protected recordings may be restricted to the original Media Center environment.

What the MJPG format is

MJPG, or Motion JPEG, stores video as a sequence of independent JPEG-compressed frames. Each frame can be decoded without reference to neighboring frames, which suits frame extraction, basic video editing, scientific or industrial capture software, and devices that support JPEG frames but not MPEG or H.264.

MJPG is straightforward to edit and seek through, but it is inefficient for long recordings. Its files are usually much larger than equivalent MPEG-2, H.264, or H.265 files, and a raw .mjpg stream generally carries video only; WTV audio and metadata are not preserved.

How to actually convert WTV to MJPG

Using 101convert.com

1. Open the video converter on 101convert.com.
2. Upload the WTV recording and select MJPG as the output format.
3. Start the conversion and download the resulting .mjpg file when processing finishes.

This option requires no software installation. A protected WTV recording may still fail because conversion tools cannot decode its video stream.

Using FFmpeg

FFmpeg can read WTV containers and encode their video with the MJPEG encoder. Run this command in the directory containing the recording:

ffmpeg -i recording.wtv -map 0:v:0 -c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 -an -f mjpeg recording.mjpg

The options select the first video stream, encode every frame as JPEG, discard audio, and write a raw MJPEG stream. FFmpeg's JPEG quality scale runs from approximately 2 for very high quality to 31 for low quality; values from 3 to 6 are a practical starting range.

If the required application expects MJPEG inside an AVI container rather than a raw .mjpg stream, use:

ffmpeg -i recording.wtv -map 0:v:0 -c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 -an recording.avi

That file still contains Motion JPEG video, but its extension and container are AVI. Use the raw-MJPEG command when the receiving system explicitly requires an .mjpg file.

Quality, compatibility, and limitations

Television recordings are often interlaced. If the converted video shows comb-shaped edges during motion, deinterlace it while encoding:

ffmpeg -i recording.wtv -map 0:v:0 -vf yadif -c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 -an -f mjpeg recording.mjpg

Deinterlacing changes the source frames and may increase or decrease the frame count depending on the filter mode. If the WTV contains multiple video streams, inspect them with ffprobe recording.wtv and adjust the -map value. Captions, WTV program metadata, and normally all audio are lost when producing a raw MJPG stream.

Some software accepts only MJPEG-in-AVI, not a raw sequence of JPEG frames. Confirm the target application's specification before choosing the output container; changing .avi to .mjpg does not convert the file.