3G2 to EPS Converter

3G2 to EPS: A Phone Frame on a PostScript Page

.3g2 is the 3GPP2 multimedia file format — the recording container CDMA2000 handsets used, specified in 3GPP2 C.S0050 and served under the MIME type video/3gpp2. It is the CDMA cousin of .3gp, which 3GPP standardised as TS 26.244 for GSM and UMTS phones, and this page accepts either extension.

EPS is Encapsulated PostScript, a page-description wrapper from the desktop-publishing era. Converting between them means decoding one frame out of the clip and embedding that frame as a raster image inside a PostScript file a layout program can place. Nothing is traced or vectorised here — an EPS can hold vector paths, but what goes into this one is a grid of pixels, and it enlarges exactly as badly as a PNG would.

The specific problem with this pairing is size, and it runs the opposite way from what people expect.

Phone Frames Are Small, and EPS Places Them at 72 DPI

The EPS is written at a fixed density of 72 pixels per inch, so one pixel becomes exactly one PostScript point. There is no DPI control on this page. That means the placed size follows directly from the frame's pixel dimensions — and a phone clip from the CDMA era has very few of those. We decoded frames at each size these files actually use and measured the result:

Read the last column first, because it is the one that decides whether this conversion is worth doing. Placed at 100% the graphic is only 72 DPI, which looks soft in print; shrink it until the effective resolution is print-grade and a QCIF frame is barely half an inch wide. There is no way around that — the pixels are simply not there. If the picture has to be large on the page, the honest answer is that a phone clip from this era cannot supply it, and enlarging is not a fix.

The middle column shows the other cost. Because the image data is stored uncompressed and then written as ASCII hexadecimal — two text characters per byte — the file runs at roughly 6.1 to 6.5 bytes per pixel regardless of content. That makes even a tiny frame a six-figure file.

How to Convert 3G2 to EPS

1. Upload Your 3G2 File: Drag the .3g2 onto the page or click "Add Files". .3gp files are accepted here too — they are the GSM-side sibling of the same container and decode identically. Several clips can be queued with the same settings.
2. Pick the frame with Frame Selection: The group opens on Specific Frame with Time (seconds) at 0. Type the moment you want; decimals such as 12.5 work. Multiple Screenshots instead samples the whole clip at a Capture Rate between one frame every 0.1 second and one every 10 seconds, writing one EPS per captured frame.
3. Use Image resolution only to shrink: This page exposes just Keep original (preselected) and Resolution Percentage, and the percentage slider runs 1 to 100 — it can reduce the frame but never enlarge it. Because the bounding box follows the pixel dimensions, halving the percentage halves both the placed size and the file size.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .eps. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, decoded on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

What the Clip Carries and What Reaches the Page

That H.263 row explains why the frame sizes in the table above are so consistent. H.263 accepts only five picture sizes — 128 x 96, 176 x 144, 352 x 288, 704 x 576 and 1408 x 1152 — so a clip encoded with it is guaranteed to be one of them, and you can predict the placed size before you convert. MPEG-4 Part 2 clips are freer, but handsets of that generation rarely went beyond CIF anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the EPS be scalable vector artwork?

No. The frame is embedded as a raster and stays one, so enlarging it in a layout application magnifies pixels. EPS is a container that is capable of holding vectors; nothing on this page creates any. Automatic tracing of a photographic frame produces a blobby approximation rather than a faithful scalable copy, which is why no honest converter offers it as a feature.

Can I make the graphic bigger, or increase the DPI?

Not from this page, in either sense. The density is pinned at 72 pixels per inch and there is no DPI box, and the Resolution Percentage slider tops out at 100 — it shrinks only. You can of course enlarge the placement inside your layout program, but that lowers the effective resolution rather than adding detail, and a phone frame will not survive it. If the picture needs to be physically large and sharp, the source cannot deliver it.

Why is such a small picture producing such a large file?

Because there is no compression at any stage, and the pixel data is then written as ASCII hexadecimal — two text characters for every byte. Three channels at two characters each works out around six bytes of file per pixel, which our measurements confirmed from 6.54 down to 6.09 bytes per pixel across the frame sizes above. The upside is a plain 7-bit text file any PostScript interpreter can read; the downside is that a 176 x 144 thumbnail becomes a 160 KB document.

Why are there no width and height boxes under Image resolution?

The EPS path exposes only Keep original and Resolution Percentage. Most other still-image targets on this site also offer preset resolutions and explicit width and height fields; they are not rendered here. Percentage applies to both dimensions together, so the frame's aspect ratio is always preserved.

My frame came out black. What went wrong?

Time (seconds) was left at its starting value of 0, and phone recordings very often begin on a black or badly exposed frame while the sensor settles. Type a timestamp from inside the clip instead. If you cannot preview the file at all, run Multiple Screenshots at a slow rate such as five or ten seconds per frame as a contact sheet first, find the moment, then re-run on Specific Frame.

What does Multiple Screenshots actually produce?

One EPS per captured frame, not one file containing many — EPS holds a single page of graphics and has no concept of a sequence. At the default rate of one frame per second a three-minute clip produces 180 separate files, and at these file sizes that adds up fast. Start coarse and narrow down. When a job produces more than one file, a download-all option appears alongside the individual downloads.

My picture is rotated the wrong way. Can this page fix it?

Not on this page. Phones record with the sensor in a fixed orientation and mark the intended rotation in the container, and how faithfully that mark travels through a decode varies. There is no rotate control here, so the fix is to correct the orientation after conversion in whatever tool places the graphic, or to take the frame as 3G2 to PNG instead and rotate it in an image editor before placing it.

What happened to the audio track?

It is discarded. An EPS describes graphics on a page and has nowhere to store an audio stream. That matters more on .3g2 than on most formats, because CDMA handsets often recorded with vocoders built for voice rather than general audio, and those tracks are frequently the more interesting half of an old clip. If you want the sound as a separate file, run the same source through 3G2 to MP3.

Is EPS still the right choice for me?

Only if something specifically demands it. EPS survives in legacy prepress ingest that rejects other formats, in the classic latex to DVI to PostScript route, and when replacing a link in an old layout document in kind. For everything else PDF has replaced it, and a small raster frame is far better served as a raster: 3G2 to PNG gives you the same picture losslessly at a fraction of the size, and 3G2 to JPG smaller still.

What happens to my clip after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, decoded on our servers, and both the upload and the EPS files it produced are deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, and there is no sign-up or watermark. Files from this era are small, so the upload is rarely the bottleneck — but if you only want one frame out of a long recording, trimming first with Video Cutter, which takes .3g2 directly, is still tidier.