Publisher to TS Converter

Publisher to TS: A Document Rendered as a Transport Stream

A .pub is a Microsoft Publisher document — a page-layout file, not a picture and not a video. A .ts is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, the ISO/IEC 13818-1 packet format that broadcast, IPTV and HLS chains are built on. Converting one into the other gives you a video slide of every page in the publication, in a container that drops onto a playout playlist or an editing timeline alongside camcorder footage.

The route people usually want this for is signage and internal video: a newsletter, a menu board, a set of notice pages that has to appear on a screen driven by something that plays transport streams. It works because Publisher documents get treated as documents here rather than as images — the file goes through a real office rendering pipeline, not an image decoder that would simply refuse it.

How the Conversion Actually Runs

Three stages, each of which explains something about the result:

• Stage one — Publisher to PDF. LibreOffice opens the .pub with its Draw component, importing it through libmspub, the Document Liberation Project's Microsoft Publisher import library. Publisher has no native LibreOffice filter of its own; libmspub is what makes the file readable at all.
• Stage two — PDF to page images. Each page of the intermediate PDF is rendered at 300 DPI and written as an image. At that density a US Letter page comes out at 2550 x 3300 pixels and an A4 page at roughly 2480 x 3508.
• Stage three — images to video. The page renders are encoded as a slideshow, one frame per page, each held for the duration you set.

Two consequences worth planning around. First, whatever LibreOffice's importer makes of your layout is what you get — fidelity depends on libmspub's rendering rather than on Publisher itself, so unusual fonts, effects or embedded objects can shift. Rendering to PDF first and eyeballing it is the cheapest way to check, which Publisher to PDF does directly. Second, a portrait page rendered at 300 DPI is a tall raster that will not fill a landscape frame, which is what the Video resolution and Background Color settings exist to sort out.

How to Convert Publisher to TS

1. Upload Your Publisher File: Drag the .pub onto the page or click "+ Add Files". Every page in the publication becomes one frame of the finished video.
2. Leave Video Codec on H.264: It is preselected, it is what transport-stream players and HLS packagers expect, and it is the only entry in the list that both handles a full-resolution page render and encodes reliably at this pipeline's frame rate. The alternatives, and the one that fails outright, are tabulated below.
3. Set Video resolution to Match Your Screen: Video resolution opens on Keep original, which gives you the tall 300 DPI page raster. Switch to a Fixed Resolution such as 1920 x 1080 if the file has to sit in a landscape timeline or drive a landscape display.
4. Choose a File Compression Mode and Convert: Quality Preset opens on Very High (Recommended) and resolves to a real CRF on H.264. Click Convert and save the .ts. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are rendered and encoded on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

Runtime, Framing and the Two Controls That Set Them

Because every frame is a static page, the pipeline encodes at one frame per second and holds each page for the Image Duration you choose. That control opens at 5 seconds per frame, so a six-page brochure becomes a thirty-second video, and the list runs from a single frame (1/60s, 1/30s, 1/24s) up to 10 seconds. There is no separate total-length control and no frame-rate control: if you need a specific runtime, divide it by the page count and pick the nearest value. B-frames are disabled, since identical frames gain nothing from them.

The second control is Background Color, which opens on White. It fills the area a page does not cover — which, for a portrait publication inside a landscape frame, is a substantial pair of bars down each side. White usually looks right for a document and looks wrong the moment the clip sits next to camera footage, so change it deliberately rather than by default.

One size limit to know: before encoding, every page render is clamped so that neither side exceeds 4096 pixels. At 300 DPI that ceiling arrives at about 13.6 inches, so Letter and A4 pages pass through untouched while Legal and Tabloid publications are scaled down at "Keep original". Choosing an explicit Fixed Resolution sidesteps the question entirely.

Codec Choices for a Page Render

What the Finished File Contains

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the video look exactly like my Publisher document?

Close, with the usual caveats of any cross-application layout render. LibreOffice's Draw component opens the file through the libmspub importer, and while that library handles ordinary Publisher layouts well, it is a clean-room importer rather than Publisher itself. Fonts that are not installed get substituted, some effects and embedded objects render differently, and complex text wrapping can shift. Convert to Publisher to PDF first and look at that — it is the same render, one stage earlier, and it takes seconds to check.

Why is my page letterboxed with white bars?

Because a portrait page does not fill a landscape frame, and Background Color defaults to White on this route. A 300 DPI Letter page is 2550 x 3300 — taller than it is wide — so fitting it into a 1920 x 1080 frame leaves a bar on each side. Change Background Color to Black or to a colour that matches your house style, or pick a Fixed Resolution with a portrait aspect ratio if the display it will run on is rotated.

Can I control how long each page stays on screen?

Yes, but not per page. Image Duration applies the same hold time to every page in the publication, from a single frame up to 10 seconds, opening at 5 seconds. If one page genuinely needs longer, split the publication and convert the sections separately, then assemble the transport streams — appending is one of the things .ts genuinely does well, provided every segment was converted with matching codec, resolution and frame rate.

Why does the text look soft compared with the PDF?

Two lossy stages sit between the page and the video, and both cost a little sharpness on type. The page is rendered to an intermediate image, and that image is then encoded by a video codec whose weakest content is exactly high-contrast text edges. The fixes are the obvious ones: keep Quality Preset at "Very High" or move to Constant Quality with a low CRF, and set a Fixed Resolution at or above the size the video will actually be displayed at rather than letting a player scale it up. If crisp text is the priority and motion is not, render the pages as stills with Publisher to PNG instead.

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

It carries the same kind of H.264 stream, but the packet framing differs. This page writes plain 188-byte transport-stream packets, which is what .ts and .mts both use. An .m2ts gets BDAV framing instead — 192-byte packets, each with a four-byte arrival-timestamp prefix ahead of the sync byte — which is what Blu-ray and AVCHD disc structures expect. If you specifically need that framing, Publisher to M2TS writes it. None of the three is a disc: a real AVCHD volume also needs a BDMV directory layout and AC-3 or LPCM audio, and this output is a single silent file.

Why is there no sound?

Because there is no audio anywhere in this pipeline. A Publisher document has no sound track, so the Audio Codec control is hidden on image-and-document-to-video routes and the result is a single video stream with no audio stream at all — not a silent track, none. If a signage player or ingest system requires an audio elementary stream to be present, add one in an editor after the fact.

My multi-page publication became one long video. Can I get one file per page?

Not directly — the pages are rendered together and encoded as a single slideshow, which is what this route is designed to produce. If you need each page as its own asset, render the pages as stills first with Publisher to JPG, which writes one image per page, then convert the pages you want individually.

Can I use the file in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve?

Generally yes — both read H.264 in a transport stream. The friction, when it appears, is the one-frame-per-second rate: some editors and ingest systems reject non-standard frame rates outright, and there is no frame-rate control on this page. If your NLE refuses the file, re-encode it at a conventional rate in a desktop tool, or drop the page renders onto a timeline as stills and set the durations there, which gives you more control anyway.

Would MP4 be a better container than TS?

For anything that is not a broadcast or streaming chain, yes. MP4 carries the same H.264 video with much less per-packet overhead, plays in browsers, on phones and in every editor, and needs no explanation to whoever receives it — Publisher to MP4 produces the same slideshow in the friendlier wrapper. Transport-stream framing earns its place when the destination demands it: an HLS segmenter, an IPTV or DVB chain, or a signage player that only reads .ts.

What happens to my Publisher file after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered 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. If you need the pages as high-resolution stills rather than as video, Publisher to TIFF renders each page at the same 300 DPI.