MRW to MPEG-2 Converter

Building an MPEG-2 Slideshow from Minolta MRW Raws: What This Covers

Minolta and Konica Minolta raws stopped being written in 2006, which means most MRW archives are now twenty-year-old family and travel shoots sitting in a folder nothing wants to open. This walk-through turns them into an MPEG-2 slideshow — one held picture after another in an MPEG program stream, the format DVD authoring software and older set-top hardware were built around. It covers how to time the slides, how to keep the 4:3 frame from being letterboxed, and which of the visible settings genuinely change what comes out.

How to Convert MRW to MPEG-2

1. Upload Your MRW Files: Drag the .mrw files onto the page or click "+ Add Files"; queue as many as the slideshow needs. Only .mrw is accepted here. Everything is 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.
2. Pick a Merge strategy: "Merge images" is what makes a slideshow — every raw becomes one held segment of a single MPEG-2 file, in the order they were queued. "Video per image" hands back a separate clip for each raw instead.
3. Set the Image Duration: This is the per-slide hold time. The dropdown runs from a single frame at 60 fps, through fractional values for timelapse playback, up to ten seconds per image; leave it and each slide holds for five seconds.
4. Choose the Video resolution and Convert: "Keep original" uses the decoded raw size, a height preset scales while keeping the 4:3 shape, and "Width x Height" takes exact figures such as 720 × 480. Click Convert to download.

Walk-through: Timing, Framing and File Size

The output is always one frame per second with B-frames switched off, so the arithmetic is simple: clip length = number of raws × Image Duration. Thirty MRWs at four seconds each is a two-minute video. Fractional durations exist for a different purpose — if you shot an interval sequence on a DiMAGE, setting a sixtieth or a twenty-fourth of a second per image turns the folder into a timelapse rather than a gallery.

Framing is the part that catches people out. Every Minolta body that wrote MRW shot a 4:3 or 3:2 frame, and the common video shapes are 16:9. "Keep original" and the height presets both preserve the picture's own aspect ratio, so nothing is added and nothing is cropped. Choose a fixed 16:9 resolution and the picture is centred inside it with bars down each side, painted in the Background Color — which starts on White, not black, so on a DVD menu background those bars are conspicuous. Set it to Black if the slideshow will be watched on a television.

Size follows resolution and almost nothing else. The DiMAGE A2 file we tested decodes to 3272 × 2456 and produced a 2,430,976-byte clip for a single five-second slide at that size; the same slide at 766 × 576 came back at 208,896 bytes, about twelve times smaller. Exactly how steep that ratio is depends on the picture — a busy frame costs the encoder more at every size — but the direction never changes. The reason the quality controls do not help is in the next section.

Why the Quality Settings Do Nothing Here

MRW Reference

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did MRW stop being updated?

Konica Minolta withdrew from the camera business in 2006 and its digital camera assets went to Sony, which continued the lens mount but switched the raw extension to ARW. Nothing new has written an MRW since, which is why decoder support for it lives mostly in dedicated raw libraries rather than in mainstream photo applications.

Do the DiMAGE compacts and the Dynax DSLRs behave differently here?

Not from the converter's point of view. Both write the same MRW container — the file starts with the \0MRM marker and a PRD block describing the picture — and both decode through the same path. The visible difference is sensor size and therefore output dimensions, which you can see for yourself on the finished clip.

How long will my slideshow be?

Number of raws multiplied by the Image Duration. The encode runs at one frame per second, so a fifty-image shoot at three seconds each is 150 seconds. There is no separate frame-rate control on this page; the duration dropdown is what sets the pace.

Why are the bars beside my picture white?

Because the Background Color option defaults to White on image sources, and it is that colour that fills any pillarbox or letterbox area created when the output frame is a different shape from the raw. Choose Black from the dropdown for television playback, or avoid the bars entirely by leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" or on one of the height presets, both of which follow the picture's own aspect ratio.

Can I add music to the slideshow?

Not on this page. Image-to-video conversions are silent by design and the Audio Codec group is not rendered at all, so the output has a single video stream. Add a soundtrack afterwards in a video editor, which is also where you would add titles and transitions.

Will the resulting file burn to a DVD?

Only at DVD dimensions. MPEG-2 is the correct codec, but the disc specification also fixes the frame size at 720 × 480 for NTSC or 720 × 576 for PAL. Type those into "Width x Height" and the stream itself will be acceptable; the VIDEO_TS structure, menus and IFO files are then built by your authoring application.

Is any raw detail lost in the conversion?

Yes, and unavoidably. The raw is demosaiced to a full-colour picture, scaled to the output frame size and then compressed with a mid-1990s motion-compensated codec. At DVD dimensions a 8-megapixel DiMAGE frame is being reduced by roughly twenty times before it is even encoded. If you want to keep the detail, convert to stills instead with MRW to TIFF or MRW to JPG.

What should I use if the slideshow is for a phone or a website?

MRW to MP4 — same slideshow behaviour, a codec that browsers and phones decode natively, and a much smaller file at equivalent quality. Keep MPEG-2 for disc authoring, broadcast ingest and playback hardware old enough to need it.