CRW to TS Converter

What a CRW to TS Conversion Actually Produces

.crw is Canon's first raw format — undeveloped sensor data wrapped in CIFF, the Camera Image File Format Canon published in 1997 and used on the EOS D30, D60, 10D and 300D and on the PowerShot G and Pro series. .ts is the MPEG-2 transport stream defined in ISO/IEC 13818-1: media chopped into fixed 188-byte packets, each starting with the sync byte 0x47, so a broadcast or streaming receiver can lock onto the stream part-way through and lose only a fraction of a second to a corrupted packet.

Putting a photograph into a broadcast container is a narrow thing to want, and this page is written for the case where it is genuinely the right answer: a slate, an ident, a test card or a hold frame that a playout system, an IPTV encoder or an HLS-era segmenter needs handed to it as .ts. What you get is one developed frame held motionless for a duration you pick, with no audio track. If you wanted a picture rather than a clip, CRW to JPG is the page you want; if you wanted something that plays everywhere, CRW to MP4 is.

How to Convert CRW to TS

1. Upload Your CRW File: Drag the .crw onto the page or click "+ Add Files" — straight off an EOS D30, D60, 10D or 300D, or a PowerShot G-series compact. Queue several if you want them in one clip; any companion .thm thumbnails alongside them are ignored.
2. Set Merge Strategy and Image Duration: Merge strategy opens on Merge images, which joins every upload into one stream in upload order; Video per image writes a separate .ts per photograph instead. Image Duration decides how long each still is held and opens on 5 seconds per frame, with the dropdown running from a single frame at 1/60s up to 10 seconds.
3. Check Video Codec, Background Color and Video resolution: Video Codec opens on H.264 and also offers H.265, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX and Xvid. Background Color opens on White and fills whatever area a 3:2 photograph leaves empty in a wider frame. Video resolution opens on Keep original, with Fixed Resolutions, Preset Resolutions and explicit Width/Height alternatives underneath.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the silent .ts. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are developed and encoded on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.

Walk-through: The Three Decisions That Change the File

The raw is developed first, and that step is one-way. A .crw holds mosaic sensor data with real latitude — highlights to pull back, white balance to shift, exposure to push. Nothing can encode that directly, so the file is demosaiced into ordinary RGB pixels using the white balance the camera recorded, producing an 8-bit sRGB frame. Once that frame is inside the transport stream, the latitude is spent exactly as it would be in a JPEG. Develop in Canon's Digital Photo Professional, Lightroom or RawTherapee first if the look matters, and keep the .crw as your master either way.

CRW is the rare raw where "Keep original" really does keep everything. Every still is normalised before encoding and clamped to 4096 pixels on the long edge. That clamp bites hard on a modern 24-megapixel raw, but the bodies that wrote CRW were three- to six-megapixel machines: an EOS D30 frame is 2160 x 1440 and a D60 or 10D frame is around 3072 x 2048, both comfortably inside the limit. Leaving Video resolution on Keep original therefore hands the encoder the full developed frame. Switch to Fixed Resolutions and take 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) only when the receiving chain needs a standard raster — which, for a transport stream, it usually does.

• Slate you will trim on a timeline: leave Image Duration on 5 seconds and pick Fixed Resolutions 1920 x 1080.
• Single freeze frame to place manually: set Image Duration to 1/24s, 1/30s or 1/60s and use Video per image.
• A run of stills back to back: leave Merge strategy on Merge images; the clip's length is the duration multiplied by the file count.
• Neutral pillarbox bars: change Background Color from White to Black before converting, not after.

The clip is one frame per second, and it is silent. Stills are encoded at 1 fps with B-frames disabled, so a 5-second duration is five identical frames rather than motion. There is no pan, no zoom and no transition. There is also no audio: a photograph carries no sound, so no Audio Codec control is rendered on this page at all and nothing is written.

What the .ts File Contains

Which Controls Do Anything on This Page

Common Problems and What They Mean

• "Nothing moves." Correct. One CRW becomes one frame held for the Image Duration. Add motion on your timeline, or upload several frames with Merge images.
• "There is no sound." Expected, and not fixable on this page. Lay audio under the clip in an editor afterwards.
• "The picture has bars down the sides." A 3:2 Canon still does not fill a 16:9 raster, so it is pillarboxed and the bars take your Background Color. Change the colour, or stay on Keep original so the frame matches the photograph exactly.
• "The 1080p preset gave me a 1620-pixel-wide frame." That is Preset Resolutions, which sets height only and lets width follow the source aspect. Use Fixed Resolutions for exact pairs.
• "My editor reads the clip as 1 fps." That is how a held still is written. Most editors conform it to the timeline rate on import.
• "The raw will not decode." Check the file really is a CIFF .crw and not a renamed CR2, and that it copied off the card intact.
• "Quality Preset made no difference." You are almost certainly on MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX or Xvid. Use Constant Quality there, or switch back to H.264.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I put a Canon raw into a transport stream instead of an MP4?

Because something downstream insists on the standard 188-byte stream. DVB and ATSC playout systems, IPTV encoders, set-top capture tools and older HLS pipelines that segment into .ts all read transport streams natively and may refuse an MP4. If nothing in your chain has that requirement, CRW to MP4 carries the same H.264 video in a container that phones, browsers, televisions and current editors all accept, and it is the better default.

Is the TS on this page the same thing as MTS or M2TS?

They carry the same encoded video but the byte layout differs, and the extension decides which you get. A plain .ts and an .MTS are both packetized as 188-byte packets with the sync byte at offset 0. The .m2ts spelling gets BDAV framing instead: each packet is preceded by a four-byte arrival-timestamp header for 192 bytes total, with the sync byte at offset 4. Renaming a file does not re-frame it, so generate the extension your software actually inspects. CRW to MTS writes the camcorder-style spelling of the same plain stream.

Does the TS keep the raw's editing latitude?

No. To encode a .crw at all, the mosaic sensor data has to be demosaiced into RGB, and that step commits a white balance, an exposure and a tone curve — here, the ones the camera recorded. The frame inside the transport stream is a finished 8-bit picture, no more recoverable than a JPEG. If you may still want to grade the shot, archive the .crw, develop it deliberately, and convert the developed export instead. For a full-quality still master, CRW to TIFF keeps every pixel without wrapping it in video.

My CRW is only three megapixels. Will it look soft at 1080p?

Less than you would expect, and this is the gentle case. A 3.1-megapixel EOS D30 frame is 2160 x 1440, only a modest step down to 1920 x 1080, where a 24-megapixel modern raw would be shrunk hard. The 3:2 shape still does not fill a 16:9 frame, so expect pillarbox bars in your chosen Background Color. If you want every captured pixel with no video framing at all, keep it as an image instead.

Which video codec should I leave selected?

H.264, which is what the dropdown opens on. A transport stream is codec-agnostic by design and this page will also write MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid and H.265 into it, but H.264 is the broadest-compatibility choice for transport-stream players and the codec HLS segments historically carried. Choose MPEG-2 only if a classic DVB or ATSC chain expects it. The DivX and Xvid entries encode successfully but are not what a broadcast tool looks for inside a .ts, and on those codecs the Quality Preset dropdown stops doing anything for a still source.

Can I put several CRW photos into one TS file?

Yes, and it is the pre-selected behaviour. Queue them in the order you want, leave Merge strategy on Merge images, and each developed frame is held for the Image Duration before cutting to the next — hard cuts, no transitions, still silent. The finished length is your Image Duration multiplied by the number of files. Choose Video per image instead to receive one .ts per photograph, which is often easier to place independently in an edit.

Why is the file so small compared with the raw?

Because a motionless frame compresses extraordinarily well. After the first keyframe, every subsequent frame in a held still is predicted almost perfectly from the one before it, so it costs almost nothing to encode. A multi-megabyte raw routinely becomes a transport stream of a few hundred kilobytes at 5 seconds. That is not a sign the picture was degraded beyond the develop step — it is the codec doing what it is good at.

Will a Blu-ray player or camcorder accept this file?

Not reliably, and that is not what the pairing is for. Consumer playback hardware expects a complete disc or card structure with a conforming audio track and one of the standard broadcast frame rates, none of which a single silent still at 1 fps satisfies. Treat the output as a stream for an ingest tool or an editing timeline. For something you can hand to a person and expect to play, use MP4.

How are my files handled, and how long are they kept?

Your .crw is uploaded over an encrypted connection, developed and encoded on our servers, then deleted automatically after a few hours along with the .ts it produced. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and nothing is shared or made public. The practical limit on a large batch is upload size and time rather than anything on our side, though early-Canon raws are typically only a few megabytes each and move quickly even in groups.