Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your GMV file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert GMV to another file type
To convert GMV recordings to another format, you need Gens or other Game software.
Convert a file to GMV
To convert other file formats to the "Gameplay Replay File" file type, you need software like Gens or a similar tool.
About GMV files
A .GMV file most commonly acts as a gameplay recording file generated by the Gens emulator for Sega Genesis games. Alternatively, it serves as a 3D geometry data file for the General Mesh Viewer (GMV), a scientific visualization tool developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Gens .GMV format is highly restrictive because it is not an actual video file. Instead of storing pixels and audio, it records exact controller inputs synced to specific game frames. This means the file requires the original game ROM and the exact version of the emulator to play. Users often try to convert these files to standard video formats to share on platforms like YouTube, but quickly find that normal video converters cannot process them due to the lack of media streams. To share a Gens replay, you cannot simply convert it. You must play the .GMV file inside the Gens emulator and use external screen recording software or built-in AVI dumping tools to capture the actual video output. For 3D mesh .GMV files, the format uses proprietary ASCII or binary grid structures. Exporting these scientific meshes to standard OBJ or STL formats requires specific scientific scripts or the original LaGriT software. This file format is difficult to open or convert because it relies entirely on the internal processing of specialized software. Often, only the original software can properly read or export the data. However, you can use convert.guru as your first step: just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view its internal metadata, and attempt conversion. Even if it is a closed, proprietary format, convert.guru can still inspect the file and show raw text or internal content. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GMV file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert GMV file to EXE, ISO, BIN, CUE, PAK, WAD, PK3, PK4, BSP, MAP, SAV or DAT, you can use Gens or similar software from the "Emulator Replays & 3D Meshes" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MOD, BIN, CFG, SCX, DAT, MPQ, LOG, CUE, INI, EXE, SCM or ISO files to GMV, try Gens or another comparable tool in the "Emulator Replays & 3D Meshes" category.
The GMV 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 GMV converter.