Publisher to MPEG Converter

Publisher to MPEG: What This Converter Does and Where It Trips

Converting a Microsoft Publisher document to MPEG produces a slideshow: each page of the .pub is rendered to an image, and those images become the frames of an MPEG program stream — the same container family that DVD-Video and VCD were built on. It is the right target when you need something a legacy player, DVD-authoring tool or older broadcast system will accept without complaint. It is also the most fragile of the video targets on this site, because MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 both enforce constraints that modern codecs simply do not. This page explains the two failure modes you are most likely to hit and how to avoid both of them.

What the Conversion Produces

How to Convert Publisher to MPEG

1. Upload Your Publisher File: Drag and drop your .pub onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Several Publisher files can be queued at once.
2. Leave the Video Codec on MPEG-2: "Video Codec" offers MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is preselected and is the only one that works for a page slideshow — the reason is explained below.
3. Set an Explicit Video Resolution: This is the single most important setting on this page. Under "Video resolution", choose Fixed Resolutions and pick something like 1920 × 1080 rather than leaving Keep original. It avoids a hard failure on large pages and keeps the file size sane.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download the result. Files upload over an encrypted connection and are deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

The Two Ways This Conversion Fails

MPEG-1 fails on every Publisher file. MPEG-1 only accepts a short list of standard broadcast frame rates — 24, 25 and 30 fps and their variants. Still-image sources are encoded at 1 fps, which is not on that list, so the encoder refuses to initialise and the job stops before it produces anything. In our testing, reproducing this directly against the same encoder confirmed it: mpeg1video rejected every rate below 24 fps with the message "MPEG-1/2 does not support 5/1 fps", and only accepted 24, 25 and 30. There is no workaround from this page, because the frame rate is not a setting you can change for a still source. Leave the codec on MPEG-2.

MPEG-2 refuses frames that are exactly 4096 px. MPEG-2 will not encode a frame whose width or height is an exact multiple of 4096, and our pipeline normalises oversized pages to exactly 4096 px on the long edge. Those two rules collide for any page big enough to be scaled down. In our testing, mpeg2video rejected both 4096 × 4096 and 4096 × 3072 frames with "Width or Height are not allowed to be multiples of 4096", while ordinary sizes encoded without complaint. Since pages render at 300 DPI, this affects any page longer than about 13.6 inches on its long edge:

The fix is the same in every case: set an explicit Fixed Resolution instead of Keep original. Once the frame is 1920 × 1080 or any other ordinary size, the 4096 rule never comes into play.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did my conversion fail when I selected MPEG-1?

Because MPEG-1 cannot encode at the frame rate a still-image slideshow uses. The format was designed around broadcast timing and accepts only a fixed set of rates in the 24-to-60 fps range; Publisher pages are encoded at 1 fps because there is no motion to sample. The encoder rejects the combination before writing anything. Switch the codec back to MPEG-2, which has no such restriction and is the preselected default for exactly this reason.

My large-format publication will not convert at all — why?

You are almost certainly hitting the 4096 pixel rule. A page bigger than roughly 13.6 inches on its long edge renders at more than 4096 px at 300 DPI, gets normalised down to exactly 4096, and MPEG-2 refuses that dimension outright. Set "Video resolution" to a Fixed Resolution such as 1920 × 1080 and convert again — the frame is then a normal size and the restriction never applies. This is the same reason we recommend setting a resolution as step 3 rather than treating it as optional.

Which quality setting actually changes the output?

Only the resolution. MPEG-2 has no constant-quality mode at all, so the quality controls do not survive: a Constant Quality or Constraint Quality value is accepted by the interface and then converted internally into a bitrate derived from the output resolution, and Quality Preset has nothing to scale from because a still image has no source bitrate. The practical consequence is that changing quality settings does very little while changing resolution does a great deal.

How big will the file be?

Larger than you expect, unless you set a resolution. Because the bitrate is derived from the frame size, leaving "Keep original" on a full-resolution page render produces a very high bitrate — a Letter page at 2550 × 3300 works out to roughly 45 Mbps, which turns even a short slideshow into a very large file. Common fixed resolutions are far more reasonable:

Why is the video silent?

There is no audio to carry. A .pub is a page-layout document with no sound track, so the pipeline encodes a video-only stream and the audio controls are not shown. No setting will change this. If the slideshow needs music or narration, add it afterwards in a video editor.

How long will the finished video be?

Number of pages multiplied by seconds per page. At the 5-second default a five-page brochure gives a 25-second video. "Image Duration" adjusts this from a fraction of a second up to 10 seconds per page, applied to every page equally.

Is there any difference between the .mpeg and .mpg output?

Only the file extension. Both write the same MPEG program stream with the same default MPEG-2 codec, and the same constraints apply to both. .mpg is the older three-letter spelling that legacy Windows software and DVD tools tend to expect, while .mpeg is the more explicit form. If a specific application is refusing the file, try Publisher to MPG — or simply rename the download, which is equivalent.

Should I use MPEG at all, or convert to MP4 instead?

Use MPEG only when something in your workflow specifically requires it — DVD authoring, an old set-top box, or a broadcast ingest system that will not take anything newer. For every other purpose Publisher to MP4 is a much better target: H.264 has a real quality control, no frame-rate restriction, no 4096 rule, and produces a dramatically smaller file for the same visual result.

How is my Publisher file handled, and is it kept private?

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. For long publications the practical limit is upload time rather than the number of pages.