Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your DAD file.
You'll see a preview.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to save your file in the format you want.
Convert DAD to another file type
The converter easily converts your DAD DVR videos to various formats - free and online. No Dahua Smart Player or or other Video software needed.
DAD to M4V
DAD to OGV
DAD to WEBP
DAD to SOX
DAD to DTS
DAD to PCM
DAD to MKV
DAD to WAV
DAD to H264
DAD to SBC
DAD to WV
DAD to A64
Convert a file to DAD
To convert other file formats to the "DVR Surveillance Video" file type, you need software like Dahua Smart Player or a similar tool.
About DAD files
The .dad file extension is primarily a proprietary digital video recorder (DVR) format created by Dahua Technology security systems. It contains multiplexed video and audio streams, often wrapping DHAV or ZLAV data captured by CCTV cameras. A secondary use for .dad files is storing Data Acquisition Data for infrasound sensor recordings by companies like Chaparral Physics. To open the video variants directly, users typically rely on proprietary software like the official Dahua Smart Player. The biggest disadvantage of the .dad format is its highly proprietary and closed nature. These files cannot be opened by standard media players like VLC, Windows Media Player, or QuickTime without specific codecs. The video streams are often multiplexed in non-standard ways to prevent tampering, which makes them extremely difficult to share with law enforcement, insurance adjusters, or legal teams after a security incident. To make these surveillance recordings usable, you must convert them. For universal video playback on any device, convert to MP4. For video editing in standard non-linear editors (NLEs), convert to AVI or MOV. If you are dealing with the sensor data variant, converting to CSV is best for analysis in a spreadsheet. Drop your file here to view and convert it securely right in your browser.
Use Convert.Guru to open and convert your DAD file.
If you want to convert DAD file to DB, SQLITE, SQLITE3, MDB, ACCDB, DBF, ODB, FDB, GDB, MYD, FRM or SQL, you can use Dahua Smart Player or similar software from the "Proprietary Video Surveillance Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert NDF, SQLITE3, BAK, RDB, SQL, DB4, MDF, MDB, LDF, DB, DB3 or SQLITE files to DAD, try Dahua Smart Player or another comparable tool in the "Proprietary Video Surveillance Storage" category.
The DAD Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our DAD converter.