3GP is the video container of phones from before they recorded MP4. FLAC is lossless compression that hands back every sample it was given, at roughly half the size of the WAV it came from. ffmpeg sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a 3GP file on the way to becoming a FLAC one.
What runs when a 3GP file becomes FLAC
ffmpeg held to a single thread, on a machine we rent and watch. Your 3GP file is uploaded once, ffmpeg runs once, the FLAC comes back, and neither file is kept. 3GP to FLAC is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the 3GP into the FLAC
The sound, and nothing but the sound. ffmpeg passes -vn on every audio target, so the 3GP video stream is dropped at the demultiplexer and never reaches an encoder at all. That is why this pair is quick: the picture is the expensive part of a 3GP file, and this pass does not look at it.
The running time. The FLAC plays for exactly as long as the 3GP did, because nothing on this path trims, cuts or speeds anything up.
The sample rate and the channel layout of the 3GP audio track, carried into the FLAC unchanged wherever the encoder accepts them, and resampled only where it cannot.
What 3GP to FLAC costs you
The picture, all of it, and on purpose. The 3GP video stream is dropped before any encoder sees it, and the FLAC that comes back is sound alone. Nothing in the FLAC remembers there was ever an image, and no later conversion can put one back.
Cover art carried inside the 3GP. ffmpeg counts an attached picture as a video stream, so the same -vn that drops the film drops the artwork with it. Keeping it is worse: on several audio containers the mux then fails outright with an error nobody can read.
Any second audio track, and the subtitles. ffmpeg selects one stream out of the 3GP, and a FLAC file has nowhere to put a subtitle track in any case.
Exactness, one more time. The audio inside the 3GP was compressed once already, and FLAC compresses the decoded result again. Two lossy passes do not cancel each other out, they stack.
Where 3GP and FLAC files come from
3GP. The 3GPP container, made for phones on 3G networks: small frames, low bitrates, and the format of every video shot before about 2012. It is MP4 underneath with tighter constraints.
If a model is going to read the FLAC
A FLAC file is a waveform, and a language model reads text, so handing an assistant this FLAC directly gets you nothing. The FLAC becomes useful the moment somebody turns the sound into words, and that is a separate job with its own page here. 3GP to FLAC is the step before it: get the sound out of the 3GP in a container the transcriber accepts, then hand the model a transcript instead of a file it cannot open.
Running 3GP to FLAC against the real engine with a real file, ffmpeg wrote 156,949 bytes of FLAC in 0.1 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one 3GP file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The 3GP to FLAC verdict was reached by ffprobe, meaning the container was actually demultiplexed, recognised under the right name, and carried at least one stream. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the FLAC file has anything inside it.
The same 3GP file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of a 3GP file, so the cost of choosing FLAC can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own 3GP witness file.
3GP to GIF: 164,004 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by a format signature.
3GP to MP3: 24,780 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
3GP to MP4: 45,683 bytes in 0.3 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
3GP to WAV: 266,318 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
3GP to OGG: 9,186 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
3GP to M4A: 27,723 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
Other ways into FLAC, and what they measured
Among the published routes into FLAC, 3GP is the fifth largest output of the 16 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
AAC to FLAC: 158,116 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
AVI to FLAC: 156,801 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
FLV to FLAC: 156,775 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
M4A to FLAC: 156,945 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
MKV to FLAC: 148,596 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
What we will not pretend about 3GP to FLAC
A 3GP file over 150 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
A 3GP to FLAC run that passes 240 seconds is killed, and the ffmpeg process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
The 3GP file behind the measurement on this page was 3 seconds of 320 by 240 test pattern at 25 frames a second, with a sine wave on the audio track, built by ffmpeg for the probe itself. That is why 3GP to FLAC came out at 0.1 seconds, and it is not what your file will do. The measurement proves the pair works and says almost nothing about how long yours will take.
3GP to FLAC costs half a credit per conversion, whatever the length of the 3GP. That is the same as an image or a document here, and it is a measurement rather than a gesture: an audio target on this engine is done in under two seconds, where a video target can take minutes.
A 3GP longer than 60 minutes is refused before encoding. ffprobe measures the 3GP first and answers with a refusal, rather than starting a job the 240 second guard would kill halfway to the FLAC.
3GP to FLAC waits at the audio door, which is 2 slots wide and gives up after 5 seconds rather than making you wait twenty times the length of the work. Until the 30th there was one door for everything, and a single video transcode starved every audio conversion for its whole duration: a FLAC that needed less than a second was answered with a refusal after twenty.
Nothing here reads what is inside the 3GP. No transcription, no scene detection, no summary: 3GP to FLAC is a container and codec operation, and the FLAC says exactly what the 3GP said, in a different wrapper. The sound is the whole payload.
One 3GP file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
3GP to FLAC: what people ask
What actually converts my 3GP file to FLAC?
ffmpeg does it, held to a single thread, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the 3GP file is uploaded once, ffmpeg runs once, the FLAC comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does 3GP to FLAC take?
The probe measured 0.1 seconds for 156,949 bytes of FLAC, on a 3 second file. An audio target scales far better than a video one: three minutes of source through this engine takes under a second, because only the sound is encoded. Past 240 seconds any run is stopped, and an audio one does not get close.
What do I lose going from 3GP to FLAC?
The one to know about first: The picture, all of it, and on purpose. The 3GP video stream is dropped before any encoder sees it, and the FLAC that comes back is sound alone. Nothing in the FLAC remembers there was ever an image, and no later conversion can put one back.
Does the FLAC still have the video in it?
No, and that is the entire point of the pair. The 3GP picture is dropped before any encoder touches it, so what you download is sound only. If you wanted to keep the picture you wanted a video target, and it is priced differently because it costs differently.
Is 3GP to FLAC free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one 3GP to FLAC conversion costs half a credit against it however long the 3GP runs. An audio target is charged per conversion and not per minute, because the engine encodes three minutes of sound in well under a second.