3G2 to TS Converter

3G2 to TS Converter

A .3g2 file is the 3GPP2 multimedia container — the CDMA2000 cousin of .3gp, defined by 3GPP2 in its File Formats for Multimedia Services specification (C.S0050) and built on the same ISO base media file format that MP4 uses. It is what Verizon- and Sprint-era CDMA handsets recorded to. A .ts file is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, the packet format standardised as ISO/IEC 13818-1 and ITU-T H.222.0 that carries digital broadcast, IPTV and HLS.

The two formats have almost nothing in common structurally. 3G2 is a box-structured file with an index; a transport stream is a flat run of fixed-size packets with no global index at all. This converter decodes the phone clip and re-encodes it — H.264 video with AAC audio by default — into that packet stream. This page accepts both .3g2 and .3gp uploads, since the two containers share their video codecs.

3G2 Format at a Glance

TS Format at a Glance

How to Convert 3G2 to TS

1. Upload Your 3G2 File: Drag the .3g2 onto the page or click "+ Add Files". The uploader also accepts .3gp, and several clips can queue and convert with one set of settings.
2. Confirm Video Codec and Audio Codec: Video Codec opens on H.264 and Audio Codec on AAC — the pairing every modern transport-stream reader handles. Switch Video Codec to MPEG-2 and Audio Codec to MP2 only if you are feeding legacy broadcast equipment.
3. Set File Compression: The panel opens on Quality Preset at "Very High (Recommended)". Constant Bitrate, Variable Bitrate, Specific file size, Constant Quality and Constraint Quality are also available and all behave normally on an H.264 target.
4. Leave Resolution Alone, Then Convert: Video resolution opens on Keep original, which is the right choice for a phone clip — see the note below. Click Convert to download the .ts. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

What Happens to the Audio Band

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth understanding before you blame the converter. Most .3g2 clips carry a speech codec, not a music codec. AMR-NB samples at 8 kHz and keeps roughly the 200 Hz to 3.4 kHz telephone band; the CDMA codecs 3G2 adds — EVRC, QCELP, SMV — are narrowband vocoders built for the same job. Everything above and below that band was discarded by the handset at record time.

Converting to AAC inside a transport stream preserves what is there faithfully, and it does not invent the rest. In our testing, a 10-second CIF clip with AMR-NB audio produced a transport stream whose AAC track was still sampled at 8 kHz, because the source sample rate is carried through rather than upsampled. That is the correct behaviour: resampling an 8 kHz vocoder track to 48 kHz makes the file bigger without adding a single hertz of content. If the clip is speech, it will sound like speech. If someone recorded music on a CDMA handset, the fidelity was never captured and no setting recovers it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 3G2 the same thing as 3GP?

They are siblings, not twins. Both are built on the ISO base media file format and both allow H.263, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264 video, which is why this page accepts either extension. They diverge on audio and on lineage: 3GP is the 3GPP format for GSM and UMTS networks, while 3G2 is the 3GPP2 format for CDMA2000. 3G2 adds the CDMA speech codecs — EVRC, EVRC-B, EVRC-WB, QCELP, SMV, VMR-WB — and in exchange drops HE-AAC v2 and AMR-WB+, which 3GP permits.

Why would anyone convert a phone clip to a transport stream?

Because of where it is going, never because of what it is. A transport stream is the ingest format for HLS segmenting, IPTV distribution and DVB or ATSC broadcast chains, and it is also the easiest format to append clips to. If you have a stack of old CDMA recordings destined for a streaming pipeline or a playout system, TS is the format that pipeline reads. For anything you simply want to watch or send, 3G2 to MP4 produces a smaller and far more portable file.

Will the transport stream be bigger or smaller than the 3G2?

Usually a little bigger, even though the picture is identical in detail. Two things push the size up: H.264 at a default quality target spends more bits than a 3G-era H.263 encode did, and the transport stream adds a 4-byte header to every 184 bytes of payload plus periodic program tables. In our testing a 402 KB CIF clip came back as a 575 KB transport stream. If size is the concern, raise the CRF value under Constant Quality or pick a lower Quality Preset — but a clip this small is rarely worth optimising.

Does the TS output carry an index I can seek with?

No, and that is by design rather than an omission. A transport stream is a flat sequence of 188-byte packets meant to be joined mid-stream by a receiver that has just tuned in, so there is no file-level index or duration header to consult. Players work out position by scanning packet headers and program clock references, which is why scrubbing through a large .ts can feel less responsive than scrubbing an MP4. If you need fast, accurate seeking, convert to a container that stores an index instead.

Which video codec should I pick for old broadcast hardware?

MPEG-2, paired with MP2 audio. That is the original DVB and ATSC payload, and receivers from that generation decode nothing newer. Be ready for a substantially larger file — MPEG-2 needs several times the bitrate of H.264 for comparable detail — and note that on an MPEG-2 target the Constant Quality and Constraint Quality sliders are converted internally to a bitrate figure rather than applied as a quality target, so use Constant Bitrate or Variable Bitrate if you need to hit a specific number.

What opens a .3g2 file if I want to check it before converting?

VLC Media Player reads .3g2 on Windows, macOS and Linux without extra codecs, and QuickTime opens most of them on macOS. Modern phones frequently will not: the extension is unfamiliar to current iOS and Android media apps even though the underlying container is an MP4 relative. If a .3g2 opens in VLC but nowhere else, that is the normal state of affairs for the format and a good reason to convert it.

Will converting improve the picture?

No. A CDMA-era handset recorded at QCIF (176x144) or CIF (352x288), and no conversion adds detail that was never captured. Keeping Video resolution on "Keep original" is deliberately the default here. The Preset Resolutions list will happily offer 1080p, but selecting it stretches the same handful of pixels across a much larger frame — the file grows several times over and the picture looks softer, not sharper. Let the receiving player or editor scale the clip on its own timeline instead.

Can I take just part of the clip?

Yes. The Trim control opens on "Unchanged"; switch it to Time Range and set a start time and a duration, in seconds or as HH:MM:SS.sss. Only that span is encoded into the transport stream, which also saves encoding time on a long recording. If you would rather trim after converting, Video Cutter handles the finished file.

How long do you keep my files?

Your upload is transferred over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and both the original and the transport stream are deleted automatically a few hours later. Nothing is shared, listed or made public, and no account is required. Phone clips are small, so the whole round trip is usually dominated by the conversion itself rather than by transfer time.