Digital Video

Writable

video

The Digital Video file format was developed as a videocassette format in the 1990s by a consortium of consumer video companies and is described in the IEC 61834 series of standards. DV video content utilizes Discrete Cosine Transform compression, but allows for higher quality than formats that use similar compression schemes. DV files can be "raw" with the .dv file extension or wrapped into video container formats.

Identify it

Extensions	`.dv`
MIME types	`video/dvaudio/dv`
PRONOM	`x-fmt/152`
Wikidata	`Q3796889`

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Open it

FFmpegOpen sourcereads and writes · LGPL-2.1-or-later / GPL-2.0-or-later
KinoOpen sourcereads and writes · GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later
Q960874Open sourcereads and writes · GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later
PhotoRecOpen sourcereads · GNU General Public License
Final Cut Pro Xreads and writes · proprietary license
Pinnacle Studio 17 Ultimatereads and writes
Adobe After Effectsreads · proprietary license
Creator NXT 2reads
LiVESreads
Xilisoft Video Converter 3reads

Convert it

To	With	Fidelity	Command and losses
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) 1.2.1	FFmpeg	Partial	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.flac` Audio track only: the video is dropped.
Waveform Audio	FFmpeg	Partial	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.wav` Audio track only: the video is dropped.
Matroska 1-4	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.mkv` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.
MPEG 1/2 Audio Layer 3	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.mp3` Lossy audio only: the video is dropped.
MPEG-4 Part 14	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.mp4` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.
Ogg	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.ogg` Lossy audio only: the video is dropped.
WebM	FFmpeg	Lossy	`ffmpeg -i in.dv out.webm` Re-encoded with lossy codecs by default; try `-c copy` to remux without re-encoding when the codecs fit the container.

Sources

From Converters (FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Pandoc, LibreOffice), PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-20.

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