AVI is a Microsoft container from 1992, still readable everywhere and unable to carry most of what video learned afterwards. WMA is Windows Media Audio, lossy, and tied to a decade when Windows Media Player ripped everybody CDs. ffmpeg sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to an AVI file on the way to becoming a WMA one.
What runs when an AVI file becomes WMA
ffmpeg held to a single thread, on a machine we rent and watch. Your AVI file is uploaded once, ffmpeg runs once, the WMA comes back, and neither file is kept. AVI to WMA 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 AVI into the WMA
The sound, and nothing but the sound. ffmpeg passes -vn on every audio target, so the AVI 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 an AVI file, and this pass does not look at it.
The running time. The WMA plays for exactly as long as the AVI did, because nothing on this path trims, cuts or speeds anything up.
The sample rate and the channel layout of the AVI audio track, carried into the WMA unchanged wherever the encoder accepts them, and resampled only where it cannot.
What AVI to WMA costs you
The picture, all of it, and on purpose. The AVI video stream is dropped before any encoder sees it, and the WMA that comes back is sound alone. Nothing in the WMA remembers there was ever an image, and no later conversion can put one back.
Cover art carried inside the AVI. 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 AVI, and a WMA file has nowhere to put a subtitle track in any case.
Exactness, one more time. The audio inside the AVI was compressed once already, and WMA compresses the decoded result again. Two lossy passes do not cancel each other out, they stack.
If a model is going to read the WMA
A WMA file is a waveform, and a language model reads text, so handing an assistant this WMA directly gets you nothing. The WMA becomes useful the moment somebody turns the sound into words, and that is a separate job with its own page here. AVI to WMA is the step before it: get the sound out of the AVI in a container the transcriber accepts, then hand the model a transcript instead of a file it cannot open.
Running AVI to WMA against the real engine with a real file, ffmpeg wrote 54,996 bytes of WMA in 0.1 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one AVI file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The AVI to WMA 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 WMA file has anything inside it.
The same AVI file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of an AVI file, so the cost of choosing WMA can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own AVI witness file.
AVI to GIF: 173,720 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by a format signature.
AVI to MP3: 24,711 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
AVI to MP4: 48,231 bytes in 0.3 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
AVI to WAV: 267,342 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
AVI to FLAC: 156,801 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
AVI to OGG: 9,164 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
Other ways into WMA, and what they measured
Among the published routes into WMA, AVI is the seventh largest output of the 16 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
FLAC to WMA: 54,944 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
FLV to WMA: 54,944 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
M4A to WMA: 55,094 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
MKV to WMA: 54,944 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
MOV to WMA: 55,078 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
What we will not pretend about AVI to WMA
An AVI file over 150 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
An AVI to WMA 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 AVI 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 AVI to WMA 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.
AVI to WMA costs half a credit per conversion, whatever the length of the AVI. 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.
An AVI longer than 60 minutes is refused before encoding. ffprobe measures the AVI first and answers with a refusal, rather than starting a job the 240 second guard would kill halfway to the WMA.
AVI to WMA 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 WMA that needed less than a second was answered with a refusal after twenty.
Nothing here reads what is inside the AVI. No transcription, no scene detection, no summary: AVI to WMA is a container and codec operation, and the WMA says exactly what the AVI said, in a different wrapper. The sound is the whole payload.
One AVI file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
AVI to WMA: what people ask
What actually converts my AVI file to WMA?
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 AVI file is uploaded once, ffmpeg runs once, the WMA comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does AVI to WMA take?
The probe measured 0.1 seconds for 54,996 bytes of WMA, 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 AVI to WMA?
The one to know about first: The picture, all of it, and on purpose. The AVI video stream is dropped before any encoder sees it, and the WMA that comes back is sound alone. Nothing in the WMA remembers there was ever an image, and no later conversion can put one back.
Does the WMA still have the video in it?
No, and that is the entire point of the pair. The AVI 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 AVI to WMA free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one AVI to WMA conversion costs half a credit against it however long the AVI 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.