CR2 to MPEG-2 Converter

Convert CR2 to MPEG-2

This turns a Canon raw photograph into an MPEG-2 video clip: the .cr2 is rendered to a picture, then held on screen as motion video for a duration you choose. MPEG-2 is the coding standard behind DVD-Video, DVB and ATSC broadcasting — formally ISO/IEC 13818, whose video part is also published as ITU-T H.262 — and it is what you want when a piece of equipment or software from that world will only accept an MPEG-2 stream. It is not a way to store a photograph; it is a way to make a photograph acceptable to a video pipeline.

How to Convert CR2 to MPEG-2

1. Upload Your CR2 File: Drag your .cr2 onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Queue several and Merge strategy decides what happens: "Merge images" writes one clip containing all of them, "Video per image" writes one file each.
2. Set the Image Duration: Image Duration controls how long the picture is held. The Duration dropdown runs from 1/60 of a second up to 10 seconds per frame and starts at 5 seconds.
3. Choose Resolution, Quality and Background Colour: Video resolution starts on "Keep original"; switch to Fixed Resolutions or Width x Height in Pixels when the receiving system expects a specific raster. File Compression starts on the "Very High (Recommended)" Quality Preset, with Constant Quality and Constraint Quality as the alternatives. Background Color is white by default and fills the bars if the raster you pick has a different shape from the photo.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the file. It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers and deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark.

MPEG-2 at a Glance

What This Page Actually Produces

About the .mpeg2 Extension

.mpeg2 is not a container. MPEG-2 names a family of coding standards, and the files people exchange are normally MPEG program streams carrying .mpg or .mpeg, or transport streams carrying .ts. Because .mpeg2 is not a filename extension media tools recognise, our converter selects the program-stream muxer explicitly and writes that structure into the file you asked for. What you download is a genuine MPEG program stream with an unusual name.

That matters in one practical way. If a player, an editor or an ingest tool refuses the file, the likely cause is the extension rather than the contents — many applications decide how to open a file by looking at its name first. Renaming clip.mpeg2 to clip.mpg usually resolves it immediately, and nothing inside the file has to change. If you would rather not deal with that at all, use CR2 to MPG, which produces the same program stream under the name everything already expects.

The other thing to keep in mind is that a still-image clip is not a broadcast-conformant one. DVD-Video, for instance, is specified around 720 x 480 at 29.97 interlaced frames per second for NTSC or 720 x 576 at 25 for PAL, with video peaking at 9.8 Mbit/s. A one-frame-per-second clip satisfies none of that. Authoring software will happily accept this file and re-encode it to whatever the disc or channel requires, which is the normal workflow — just do not expect the download itself to pass a conformance check.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the video one frame per second?

Because the source is a single photograph. There is no motion to sample, so the encoder is given the picture once, told to loop it, and told to stop after the duration you set. One frame per second is the rate used for that, which means a five-second clip is five identical frames. If a downstream tool wants a conventional 25 or 30 frames per second, let it re-time the clip: re-encoding identical frames costs almost nothing and any editor or authoring package will do it.

Why does the file have no sound?

There is nothing to encode. A photograph carries no audio, so no audio stream is written rather than an empty or silent one. MP2 — MPEG-1 Audio Layer II — is the audio codec MPEG-2 program streams are usually paired with and the only one this page lists, so if you add sound later in an editor, that is the codec to match.

What is the difference between this page and CR2 to MPG?

The contents are the same and the filename is not. Both encode MPEG-2 video into an MPEG program stream; this page writes it with a .mpeg2 extension, CR2 to MPG writes the same thing as .mpg. Choose whichever name the system you are feeding is expecting. If you have no particular requirement, .mpg is the safer default because more software recognises it on sight.

Should I use MPEG-2 at all in 2026?

Only when something requires it. As a codec it is thirty years old and much less efficient than H.264 or newer, so for the same visual quality it produces considerably larger files. It remains the right answer for DVD authoring, for legacy broadcast chains, and for hardware that was built around it and never updated. For anything you plan to watch, email or upload, CR2 to MP4 is smaller and plays everywhere.

How long can the clip be?

Image Duration offers up to 10 seconds per frame, and if you upload several photographs with Merge strategy on "Merge images", each one is held for that duration in sequence — so ten images at ten seconds is a hundred-second clip. For anything longer you are really building a slideshow, which is a job for editing software where you can control transitions and timing per image.

What resolution will the video be?

The photograph's own dimensions, unless you say otherwise, with one cap: the frame is prepared at no more than 4096 pixels on its long edge before encoding, so a modern high-resolution raw is scaled down to fit. If the receiving system expects a specific raster — 720 x 576, 1920 x 1080 — set it explicitly with Fixed Resolutions or Width x Height rather than relying on the source size, because broadcast and disc equipment tends to reject off-spec rasters outright.

Why are there white bars around my picture?

Because the raster you chose has a different aspect ratio from the photograph. The picture is scaled to fit inside the frame and the remainder is filled with Background Color, which is white unless you change it. Pick a colour that suits the material, choose a raster closer to the photo's shape, or leave Video resolution on "Keep original" so no padding is needed at all.

Can I get the still back out of the video later?

Yes, though there is no reason to prefer that over keeping the original. Every frame in the clip is the same rendered picture, so extracting one gives you a video-quality copy of it: 8-bit, chroma-subsampled, and already lossily compressed. The raw file remains the only copy with the sensor data intact, so keep the .cr2 and treat the MPEG-2 clip as a derived deliverable.