DV to TS Converter

Convert DV to TS: Getting Tape-Era Footage Into a Transport Stream

A .dv file is a raw DV stream — the intra-frame format MiniDV, DVCAM and Digital8 camcorders wrote to tape, standardised in IEC 61834 and SMPTE 314M. Every frame is coded independently at a constant 25 Mbit/s, with uncompressed 48 kHz PCM audio alongside it, which is why an hour of tape is about 13 GB whatever was in shot. A .ts is an MPEG transport stream: the packetised container broadcast, IPTV and streaming systems use, built to survive dropped packets and to be cut and concatenated at any point.

This guide covers the settings that matter when moving between those two worlds, and the three things about DV that catch people out — pixel aspect ratio, interlacing, and the enormous size difference.

How to Convert DV to TS

1. Upload Your DV File: Drag the .dv onto the page or click "Add Files". Captured tapes are large, so the upload is usually the slowest part of the job; several files can be queued and they share one set of settings.
2. Pick Video Codec and Audio Codec: Video Codec offers H.264 (which the page resolves to), H.265, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX and Xvid. Audio Codec offers AAC (resolved), AC3, DTS (DCA), EAC3, MP2 and MP3.
3. Choose a File Compression mode and check Video resolution: File Compression lists Quality Preset, Specific file size, Constant Bitrate, Variable Bitrate, Constant Quality and Constraint Quality. The Constant Quality slider runs from 16 to 51 and opens at 23. Video resolution opens on Keep original — read the pixel-aspect section before you change it. Trim can be set to Time Range with a Start time and a Duration.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save 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, never shared or made public.

Walk-through: What DV Actually Contains

DV comes in two shapes and knowing which one you have explains most of what happens next.

Two consequences follow immediately. First, DV's chroma is already thin — 4:1:1 in particular keeps only a quarter of the horizontal colour resolution — so heavily saturated edges and red titles will not sharpen up no matter what codec you encode them into. Second, the 25 Mbit/s figure is the whole budget regardless of content, which is why re-encoding to a modern codec shrinks the file so drastically. In one measured run, a six-second 720 x 576 PAL DV capture of 21,600,000 bytes came back as a 1,015,388-byte transport stream at the default CRF of 23 with AAC audio — about a twenty-first of the size.

On pixel aspect ratio. DV frames are not square-pixel. A 4:3 PAL tape stores 720 x 576 pixels that are meant to be displayed at 16:15, and a 4:3 NTSC tape stores 720 x 480 pixels displayed at 8:9. Nothing in this pipeline performs pixel-aspect correction, so if the display geometry matters, do not resize by percentage or by preset — set Width x Height to the shape you actually want the picture to be. For 4:3 PAL that is 768 x 576; for 4:3 NTSC, 640 x 480; for a 16:9 widescreen tape, 1024 x 576 and 854 x 480 respectively.

On interlacing. Camcorder DV is normally interlaced, storing two time-offset fields per frame. There is no de-interlacing step here, so the combing stays baked into the output and will be visible on progressive displays during motion. If your footage needs de-interlacing, do it in an editor before uploading.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "Everyone looks slightly too thin or too wide" — the anamorphic pixel aspect. Set Width x Height to the display dimensions rather than resizing by percentage.
• "Fast movement has comb-like horizontal lines" — interlaced source, no de-interlacer in this pipeline. Deinterlace before uploading.
• "The upload takes forever" — DV is 25 Mbit/s plus uncompressed audio, roughly 13 GB per hour of tape. Trim to the section you need with Video Cutter, which accepts .dv directly, before uploading a whole capture.
• "My player will not open the .ts" — transport streams are designed for playback devices and broadcast tooling rather than desktop double-clicking. VLC, mpv and most smart TVs handle them; if you need something that opens everywhere, DV to MP4 is the better target.
• "The output is still very large" — check Video resolution and File Compression. Leaving Keep original at a low CRF number on a long capture keeps a lot of data; raising the Constant Quality value toward 26–28, or setting a Specific file size, brings it down.
• "The colours in red titles smear" — DV's chroma subsampling, especially 4:1:1 on NTSC tapes, discarded that detail at capture time. Encoding to H.264 preserves what is there but cannot rebuild it.

.ts and .m2ts Are Not the Same Framing

Both carry an MPEG transport stream, but the packet layout differs, and our output extension decides which one you get.

If a Blu-ray-oriented tool insists on the timestamped variant, use DV to MP4 or convert into an .m2ts target instead — renaming a .ts will not add the extra four bytes per packet that the BDAV layout expects.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can the DV be re-wrapped into TS without re-encoding?

No. Every conversion here re-encodes: the DV frames are decoded and a new stream is encoded in the codec you selected. That is not entirely a loss — DV at 25 Mbit/s is a very inefficient way to store standard-definition footage, and H.264 at CRF 20–23 typically keeps everything visible while shrinking the file by an order of magnitude. But it does mean one generation of quality, so archive the original DV capture if it is your master.

Which video codec should I pick for a transport stream?

H.264 for nearly everything — it is what modern TS-consuming devices and streaming tools expect, and it handles interlaced standard-definition material well. MPEG-2 if you are feeding an older broadcast chain or a DVB device that predates H.264. H.265 gives smaller files but is less universally supported inside a .ts, and the older options (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid) are only worth choosing when something specific asks for them.

What Constant Quality value should I use on a DV capture?

The slider runs 16 to 51 and opens at 23, where lower is better quality and a bigger file. For standard-definition tape footage, 20 to 23 keeps the material looking as good as the source; going below 18 mostly spends bits preserving DV's own compression noise. If size is your constraint, 26 to 28 stays watchable for review copies.

Should I upscale my tape footage to 720p or 1080p?

Generally no. Upscaling invents no detail and makes the file much larger, and if a system needs a specific frame size it will normally scale on playback anyway. The exception is when you must hit a fixed delivery resolution — in which case set Width x Height explicitly so the anamorphic pixel aspect is handled at the same time.

Which audio codec should I choose?

AAC for anything general-purpose; it is efficient and widely supported. AC3 when the destination is an AV receiver or a set-top device that expects Dolby Digital, and MP2 when you are feeding a traditional DVB broadcast chain, which was built around it. DV audio arrives as uncompressed PCM, so whichever you pick is a first-generation encode of clean source audio.

Does the timecode from the tape survive?

No. DV carries timecode and recording date-and-time in its subcode area, and a transport stream has no equivalent place to keep them, so both are dropped. If your workflow depends on tape timecode, capture into an editing application that reads DV subcode and export from there instead of converting the raw stream.

Why is a .ts file useful at all compared with MP4?

Because a transport stream is self-synchronising and stateless: it can be cut at almost any packet boundary, joined end to end, and played from the middle without an index, which is exactly what broadcast, IPTV and HLS segmenting need. MP4 stores its index in a header and is happier as a single complete file. For general viewing and sharing, MP4 is the more convenient container.

My .dv is actually inside an AVI or a QuickTime file. Will it work here?

This page accepts the .dv extension, so a DV stream wrapped in an AVI or MOV container needs to go through the page for that container instead. The video data inside is the same DV essence either way; only the wrapper differs. Renaming an .avi to .dv is not reliable, because the AVI headers are still in the file.

Can I convert only part of a capture?

Yes. Set Trim to Time Range and enter a Start time and a Duration; both accept plain seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss. On a DV capture this is worth doing at the source instead — Video Cutter takes .dv directly, and cutting before uploading saves you pushing gigabytes over the connection for a clip you only need a minute of.

What happens to my files after conversion?

They are uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours, along with the output. There is no sign-up, no watermark and nothing is shared or made public. Because DV runs about 13 GB per hour, upload time on your connection is the realistic limit on how long a capture you can put through this page in one go.