Free online USM to MTS converter

What the USM format is

In the Video category, USM generally means a CRI Movie container produced with CRI Middleware's Sofdec technology. Game developers use it for pre-rendered cutscenes, menus, commercials, and other video assets; it is commonly found inside console and PC game data rather than camera recordings.

USM is a container, not a single universal video codec. It can hold video and audio streams with game-specific encoding, interleaving, encryption, or metadata. Standard players such as FFmpeg-based applications may not open every USM file directly.

What the MTS format is

MTS is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream file commonly associated with AVCHD camcorders and Blu-ray-compatible workflows. It normally contains H.264/AVC video with AAC or AC-3 audio and uses timestamps suitable for continuous camera recording.

MTS is useful when a video editor, authoring tool, television, or playback device expects an AVCHD-style transport stream. It is generally easier to edit and play than a game-specific USM file, but it is not inherently smaller or higher quality.

How to actually convert USM to MTS

1. Make a backup of the original USM file. Do not rename its extension and expect that to change the format.
2. Try the built-in converter on 101convert.com if the file is accepted; it runs in a browser without installing software. Protected or unusual game USM files may be rejected because their streams must be extracted first.
3. For a local conversion, use a CRI Movie-capable extractor such as the CRI Movie tools in VGMToolbox. Open the relevant extractor from the program's Tools menu, select the USM file, and export or demultiplex its video and audio streams. The output may be H.264, MPEG video, ADX, WAV, or another intermediate format depending on the source.
4. If the extractor produces separate streams, combine them with FFmpeg. For example, when it produces an H.264 video stream and a decoded WAV audio file, run:

ffmpeg -i extracted_video.h264 -i extracted_audio.wav -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a ac3 -b:a 192k -f mpegts output.mts

If the extracted audio is ADX and the installed FFmpeg build can decode it, replace extracted_audio.wav with the ADX filename. Otherwise decode ADX with a compatible CRI audio tool and use the resulting WAV file. If the extracted video is already suitable H.264 and its timestamps are valid, -c:v copy can avoid re-encoding, but transcoding is more reliable for AVCHD-compatible output.

Quality, compatibility, and limitations

Extraction and transcoding cannot restore quality lost in the original game asset. Re-encoding with libx264 introduces another generation of compression; use a suitable quality setting such as -crf 18 to -crf 23 if file size and quality need control.

Some USM files are encrypted or use codec variants that community tools cannot decode. A successful extraction may also produce multiple language tracks, subtitles, or segmented video; select the required stream with FFmpeg's -map options. MTS does not preserve all USM-specific metadata, game scripting, subtitles, or interactive behavior.