Music and speech hidden in MPEG files
Many MPEG files are really about the sound: a concert recorded on a DVD camcorder, a school choir on a home-made DVD, a radio or TV programme captured by a set-top box, a sermon or lecture burned to disc. When you convert MPEG to MP3, you get the audio in the most widely supported format there is, ready for a phone, a car stereo, a podcast app or a music library, at a tiny fraction of the video size.
MP2, Dolby Digital and PCM
The sound in MPEG files comes in several forms, and the tool shows which one your file has:
| Audio codec | Where it is common |
|---|---|
| MP2 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II) | Video CDs, digital TV, many PAL DVDs |
| Dolby Digital (AC-3), up to 5.1 channels | DVDs, AVCHD camcorders |
| PCM (uncompressed) | Some music DVDs and camcorders |
MP2 is an older sibling of MP3 from the same standard, but players that read MP3 do not necessarily read MP2, so the sound is decoded and encoded again as MP3. The decoding is done by the built-in converter engine of the page, because browsers do not support these codecs.
Surround sound becomes stereo
An MP3 file holds at most two channels. If your DVD has a 5.1 Dolby Digital track, the MP3 will be a stereo mix of it. For music and speech this sounds natural on headphones and normal speakers.
Bitrate and extras
For concerts and music from DVDs, choose 192 or 256 kbps, or VBR at a high quality level. For speech, 96 or 128 kbps is plenty. Use CBR if an old car stereo has trouble with VBR files.
A concert DVD usually holds many songs in one long file. Use Trim & tags to extract one song at a time: set the start and end with the player, type the song title and the artist, and use a frame of the stage as the cover. Repeat for each song to build a full live album.
Your discs and recordings are processed locally and never uploaded. For iPhone and Apple Music, MPEG to M4A is a good alternative, and for lossless sound use MPEG to FLAC.