TS to TIFF Converter

How to Convert TS to TIFF Online

1. Upload Your TS File: Drag and drop your .ts transport stream onto the upload area, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Batch uploads are supported. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on xconvert's servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours.
2. Pick Quality Preset and Compression Type: Default is Very High quality with JPEG compression inside the TIFF container. Switch Compression Type to LZW or Deflate for fully lossless output, or drop to High/Medium for smaller files.
3. Choose Frame Selection and Resolution (Optional): Use Specific Frame with a time-in-seconds input to grab a single frame, or Multiple Screenshots to pull frames across the clip. Resize with a preset (768p, 1080p, 1440p, 2160p, 4320p), set Width/Height in pixels or percent, or scale by Resolution Percentage.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Frames are decoded server-side and packaged as .tiff files you can download individually or as a zip.

Why Convert TS to TIFF?

.ts (MPEG-2 Transport Stream, ISO/IEC 13818-1, standardized in 1995) is the container used for DVB, ATSC and IPTV broadcasts and is what most DVRs, PVRs, set-top boxes, and HDHomeRun captures write to disk. Frames inside are usually H.264 or MPEG-2 video at 188-byte packets — great for transmission, terrible for editing or printing. TIFF (Aldus 1986, revision 6.0 in 1992) is the archival raster format: lossless LZW, Deflate, or PackBits compression, bit depths well past 8 bpc, and the format museums, scientific journals, and prepress shops accept as a master.

• Print and prepress masters — Pulling a high-resolution still from a broadcast capture for a magazine page, exhibition poster, or product catalogue. Prepress workflows (InDesign, QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher) accept TIFF natively at 300 DPI, where JPG would visibly band on gradients.
• Archival of broadcast captures — Libraries and broadcasters keep TIFF as the preservation master and derive JPEG/WebP access copies. Standard TIFF caps at ~4 GiB, BigTIFF extends to 18 exabytes for ultra-high-resolution panoramas.
• OCR and document recovery from a captured stream — News tickers, scoreboards, and license plates pulled from .ts capture and fed to Tesseract or ABBYY FineReader work far better at 300-600 DPI lossless TIFF than at JPG.
• Scientific and forensic work — Frame-by-frame analysis of broadcast or surveillance TS streams where JPG's 8x8 DCT blocks would destroy fine detail. TIFF preserves the raw pixel data exactly.
• Multi-page TIFF for storyboards — TIFF supports multiple images per file, so you can dump every keyframe from a .ts clip into a single multi-page TIFF for editors to flip through.
• Compatibility with legacy publishing tools — Older Adobe and Quark workflows, GIS systems (GeoTIFF), and medical imaging stacks (DICOM derivatives) expect TIFF, not modern formats like WebP or AVIF.

TS vs TIFF — Format Comparison

Quality Preset and Compression Type Quick Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my TIFF come out lossy even though TIFF is "lossless"?

TIFF is a container — it can hold lossless (LZW, Deflate, PackBits) or lossy (JPEG) data. The Compression Type dropdown defaults to JPEG-in-TIFF because frames from H.264-encoded .ts are already lossy and a JPEG-compressed TIFF is much smaller. For a true lossless export, switch Compression Type to LZW or Deflate before converting.

Should I grab one frame or all frames from a TS file?

Use Specific Frame with the seconds input when you want a single still — e.g., a thumbnail at 00:00:05. Use Multiple Screenshots when you need every frame (or every Nth frame) — e.g., for a storyboard, photogrammetry capture, or OCR pipeline. Pulling every frame from a 30-minute 1080p broadcast can produce 50,000+ TIFFs, so consider a sampling interval.

Can I pull frames at the exact source resolution?

Yes. Leave the Image Resolution group on Keep original and the output dimensions match the encoded frame size of the TS (commonly 1280x720, 1920x1080, or 3840x2160 for broadcast and HDHomeRun captures). Picking a preset like 768p will downscale; picking a higher preset will upscale via interpolation and won't recover detail the codec dropped.

What's the difference between TIFF and TIF?

Nothing — they're the same format. TIFF 6.0's spec uses three-letter file names (.tif) for DOS/Win9x compatibility, while Mac and modern systems usually write .tiff. You can rename freely; the byte signature (II*\0 little-endian or MM\0* big-endian) is what software reads.

Why is TIFF so much bigger than JPG for the same frame?

A 1920x1080 frame stored as uncompressed 24-bit RGB is exactly 6,220,800 bytes (~6 MB). LZW or Deflate typically gets that to 2-4 MB for photographic content. A high-quality JPG of the same frame is usually 200-500 KB because JPEG's DCT discards high-frequency detail your eyes barely notice. TIFF trades size for fidelity, which is exactly why it's the archival choice.

Will every TIFF viewer open a JPEG-compressed TIFF?

Almost — Photoshop, GIMP, Preview (macOS), Windows Photos, ImageMagick, IrfanView, and modern browsers via libtiff all handle JPEG-in-TIFF. The rare misses are old proprietary prepress tools and some industrial scanners. If a downstream tool rejects the file, re-export with Compression Type set to LZW or Deflate for maximum compatibility.

How do I get TIFF frames from a TS file recorded by my DVR or HDHomeRun?

Upload the .ts directly — no need to remux to MP4 first. The converter decodes the H.264 or MPEG-2 video inside the transport stream and writes TIFFs frame-by-frame. If your DVR wrote .m2ts (Blu-ray variant with 192-byte packets and a 4-byte timecode), use Convert M2TS to TIFF or Convert MTS to TIFF instead.

What if I want a more web-friendly output instead of TIFF?

For web, use Convert TS to JPG (smallest, lossy) or Convert TS to PNG (lossless 8-bit, broad browser support). For keeping the result as video, Convert TS to MP4 repackages the stream into an MP4 container. To start from a different video format, see Convert MP4 to TIFF or Convert MOV to TIFF. Already have TIFFs and want JPGs? Convert TIFF to JPG.