PEF to TS Converter

PEF to TS: What This Tutorial Covers

A .pef is a Pentax raw capture — one still frame of unprocessed sensor data — and a .ts is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, the packet format broadcast, IPTV and HLS all run on. Putting one inside the other produces a short video clip that holds your developed photograph on screen for a length you choose, in a container that a playout chain, a signage player or a segmenting pipeline will accept.

That is a narrow but real job: a slate or holding card built from a photograph, a still that a transport-stream ingest will take but a JPEG will not, or a run of frames assembled into a slideshow that concatenates cleanly with other clips. This tutorial covers the four controls that decide the result, the two codecs in the list that will waste your time, and the frame-size limit nobody mentions until the output looks smaller than expected.

How to Convert PEF to TS

1. Upload Your PEF File: Drag the .pef onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Several frames can be queued; Merge strategy opens on Merge images, joining them into one clip, with Video per image writing a separate .ts for each.
2. Set Image Duration: A still has no length of its own, so this control alone sets the runtime. It opens at 5 seconds per frame and the list runs from a single frame (1/60s, 1/30s, 1/24s) up to 10 seconds per frame.
3. Leave Video Codec on H.264 and Pick a Fixed Resolution: Video Codec opens on H.264, which is what transport-stream players and HLS packagers expect. Under Video resolution, choose a Fixed Resolution such as 1920 x 1080 rather than leaving it on "Keep original" — the reason is in the walk-through below.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .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: Why "Keep Original" Is the Wrong Choice Here

Before the encoder sees anything, the developed raw is normalised to a PNG and clamped so neither side exceeds 4096 pixels. This happens regardless of what Video resolution says, including "Keep original", and there is no control that turns it off.

A current Pentax body shoots 24 megapixels or more at a 3:2 aspect ratio, which is 6000 x 4000 pixels — comfortably past the ceiling. So "Keep original" does not keep the original; it hands you whatever the clamp arithmetic produces, and it produces a portrait-or-landscape raster that almost certainly does not match the frame your timeline is working in.

Setting a Fixed Resolution solves both problems at once. The list runs from 256 x 144 up to 8K and includes every common broadcast and social frame, and the picture is fitted inside the one you choose. Where your 3:2 photograph does not fill a 16:9 frame, the leftover area takes the Background Color, which opens on White rather than the black most video tools default to — change it explicitly if white bars will look wrong against your other material.

Two related constants worth knowing:

• The clip encodes at one frame per second. A held still gains nothing from twenty-five identical copies of itself per second, so the pipeline stores one picture per second and the file is dramatically smaller for it. There is no frame-rate control here. A five-second clip contains five frames.
• B-frames are disabled. They are useless when every frame is identical, and at one frame per second they push the stream's start time forward by a visible amount.

Which Codec to Choose, and Two to Avoid

The preset caveat is this: on codecs without a CRF mode, Quality Preset works by scaling the source video bitrate, and a still image has no source bitrate to scale. On H.264 and H.265 the preset is a real CRF selector and works normally. On MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Xvid and DivX, use Constraint Quality and set a Max bitrate instead — that is the mode that reliably reaches those encoders.

What the Transport Stream Contains

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The job produced nothing" — you selected MPEG-1. It cannot encode at one frame per second. Choose H.264, or MPEG-2 if the destination is genuinely legacy broadcast hardware.
• "The picture is smaller than my raw" — the 4096-pixel clamp, or the extra 2048-pixel cap if you picked MPEG-4, Xvid or DivX. Set an explicit Fixed Resolution so you know what you are getting.
• "There are white bars down the sides" — your 3:2 photograph inside a 16:9 frame, with Background Color at its White default. Change the colour, or pick a Fixed Resolution closer to 3:2.
• "Colours look flatter than in Lightroom" — the raw is developed neutrally: demosaic, the as-shot white balance the camera recorded, a standard tone curve, an 8-bit encode. None of your profile or edits is applied, and there is no tone-mapping stage, so a frame exposed to protect a bright sky may clip. Develop in your raw editor and convert the export instead.
• "The Quality Preset does nothing" — you are on MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Xvid or DivX, where the preset needs a source bitrate that a still image does not have. Switch to Constraint Quality and set a Max bitrate.
• "An editor rejected the clip for being 1 fps" — that is a real constraint of some NLEs and there is no frame-rate control here. Re-encode the finished .ts at a conventional rate in a desktop tool, or build the slide on a timeline instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is there no sound in the output?

Because there is no audio anywhere in the pipeline. A photograph has no sound track, so the Audio Codec control is hidden on every image-to-video route and the result is a single video stream with no audio stream at all — not a silent one, none. If a downstream tool insists on an audio elementary stream being present, add one in an editor after the fact.

How long will the clip be?

Image Duration multiplied by the number of frames. One .pef at the default is a five-second clip; six frames at "Merge images" with the same setting is thirty seconds. There is no total-length control, so if you need a specific runtime, divide it by the frame count and pick the nearest Image Duration value. For a single-frame asset that an editing timeline can treat as one frame, pick 1/24s, 1/30s or 1/60s.

Is this .ts the same thing as an .mts or .m2ts from a camcorder?

Not quite, and the difference is packet framing. This page writes plain 188-byte transport-stream packets, which is what .ts and .mts both get. An .m2ts gets BDAV framing instead: 192-byte packets, each carrying a four-byte arrival-timestamp prefix ahead of the sync byte. None of the three is a disc structure — a real AVCHD or Blu-ray volume needs a BDMV directory layout and AC-3 or LPCM audio, and this output is a single silent file.

Will the transport stream carry my EXIF or lens data?

No. A transport stream has nowhere to store photographic metadata, and the encode discards it — camera model, exposure, aperture, ISO, GPS, lens information, none of it survives into the video. If that metadata matters, keep the .pef or develop to a still that carries EXIF, such as PEF to JPG or PEF to TIFF.

What exactly is a PEF file?

Pentax Electronic File, Pentax's proprietary camera raw format. It is a TIFF-based container holding largely unprocessed sensor readings alongside the EXIF, white balance and tone metadata a raw converter needs, with a 12- or 14-bit readout depending on the body. There is no public specification. Pentax bodies can also record Adobe DNG holding the same sensor data, which is the more portable choice if you have the option at capture time.

Can I put several photographs into one transport stream?

Yes, and it is the most useful thing this page does. Upload several .pef files and keep Merge strategy on Merge images: each frame becomes one segment held for the Image Duration you set, and they play back to back in a single .ts. Choose Video per image instead for one file per photograph. Convert every batch with identical settings if you intend to concatenate the results later — a transport stream appends cleanly only when codec, resolution and frame rate match.

Should I convert the raw straight to TS, or develop it first?

Develop first whenever you can. A single-step conversion accepts a neutral raw development at whatever size the clamp produces, and neither of those is usually what you want for a broadcast slide. Export from your raw editor at the exact crop, exposure and pixel dimensions the project needs, then build the clip from that image. If you only want the photograph rather than a video wrapper, PEF to JPG is the end of the job.

Would MP4 be a better target than TS?

For almost anything that is not a broadcast or streaming chain, yes. It carries the same H.264 stream with far less per-packet overhead and plays on phones, browsers, TVs and editors — PEF to MP4 produces the same held frame in a container more things will open. Reach for .ts when the destination genuinely demands it: an HLS segmenter, an IPTV or DVB chain, or a workflow where you intend to append several clips into one continuous stream.

What happens to my raw file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, developed and encoded on our servers, and both the upload and the finished .ts are deleted automatically after a few hours. Nothing is shared or made public, there is no watermark and no account is required. There is no fixed per-file cap either; the practical limit is upload size and connection speed, which on a folder of raw frames is the part of the job you actually wait for.