Why your browser keeps giving you WEBM
WEBM was designed by Google to be the video format the open web could use without licensing fees, and that goal is why it turns up wherever a browser does the recording. Screen recorders that run as web apps, in-browser meeting recorders and camera capture tools all reach for it by default.
If you clicked record inside a browser tab rather than in a desktop application, the file waiting in your downloads folder is very likely a .webm. It may hold video and audio together, or audio alone if the tool was only capturing a microphone.
Uploading the video beats extracting the audio
There is no need to pull the audio track out into a separate file before transcribing. Upload the WEBM as it is and we take the sound from it; the video frames are ignored entirely and never form part of your transcript. Skipping the extraction step removes a chance to lose quality.
The one time separating the audio helps is when the file is very large and your connection is slow, since the video portion is almost all of the size. If a screen recording of a long meeting is stalling on upload, exporting audio alone will shrink it dramatically without touching what we read.
Frequently asked questions
Can you transcribe a WEBM that has no video, only sound?
Yes. Audio-only WEBM files are common from browser microphone recorders and they upload exactly the same way. Nothing about the process changes when there are no video frames.
What audio is actually inside a WEBM file?
Usually Opus, sometimes Vorbis. Both are handled automatically, so you never need to check which one your particular file contains before uploading it here.
My screen recording is hours long. Will that work?
Pro handles files up to two gigabytes and five hours, which covers most long screen recordings. For anything beyond that, splitting the file at a natural break is the reliable approach.