PIX to MTV Converter

Free online PIX to MTV conversion tool

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Secure Processing

All PIX uploads are encrypted in transit. Files are deleted immediately after conversion — your MTV results are available for 24 hours only.

Speedy Conversion

No long waits — PIX to MTV processing is optimized for speed. Your converted file is typically ready in just a few seconds.

Quality Preserved

The converter extracts full image data from PIX and encodes it into MTV at maximum fidelity. No unnecessary quality degradation.

How to convert PIX to MTV

1

Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.

2

Choose mtv or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)

3

Let the file convert and you can download your mtv file right afterwards

About formats

PIX is a raster image format originally developed by Alias Research (later Alias|Wavefront, then acquired by Autodesk) in the mid-1980s for use with their 3D animation and modeling software running on Silicon Graphics workstations. The format stores uncompressed 24-bit RGB image data in a straightforward scanline-by-scanline layout preceded by a minimal header containing the image width and height. PIX was the native output format of Alias's rendering engines, used to store individual frames of 3D animations and rendered stills from software that would eventually evolve into Maya, one of the most influential 3D content creation tools in entertainment history. The format's design reflected the priorities of high-end production rendering: raw speed for writing individual frames during batch renders, exact pixel fidelity with no compression artifacts, and compatibility with the hardware framebuffers used in professional compositing suites of the era. One advantage of PIX is its rendering pipeline heritage — the format can be read by tools throughout the VFX and animation industry, and legacy PIX sequences from Alias-era productions represent irreplaceable primary assets from foundational works in computer animation. The format's simplicity provides another practical benefit: with no compression overhead, metadata complexity, or container parsing required, PIX files can be read and written with minimal code, making them trivial to incorporate into custom rendering and compositing pipelines. PIX files are supported by ImageMagick, GIMP, XnView, and various professional compositing tools.
Developer: Alias Research
Initial release: 1985
MTV is a simple raster image format created by Mark T. VandeWettering for the MTV Ray Tracer, a ray tracing program released in 1988 as one of the early publicly available ray tracers distributed through Usenet. The format stores 24-bit RGB images with a minimal text header followed by raw pixel data. The header consists of a single line containing the image width and height as ASCII integers, followed immediately by the pixel data where each pixel occupies three bytes (red, green, blue) arranged in row-major order from top-left to bottom-right. The MTV Ray Tracer itself was significant in the history of computer graphics — distributed freely via the comp.graphics Usenet newsgroup, it introduced many programmers and students to the principles of ray tracing: ray-object intersection, reflection, refraction, shadows, and recursive shading. The MTV format was the program's native output, and its simplicity made it easy for users to write custom viewers and converters on whatever platform they had access to — a practical necessity in the fragmented Unix workstation landscape of the late 1980s. One advantage is extreme implementation simplicity: the format can be read in a handful of lines of code in any programming language, with no libraries, no compression algorithms, and no metadata parsing required — just read two integers and then read width x height x 3 bytes of pixel data. The format's historical significance in the computer graphics community provides another dimension — MTV files from early ray tracing experiments represent primary artifacts from the era when ray tracing transitioned from academic research to accessible software. MTV files are supported by ImageMagick and various legacy graphics tools.
Initial release: 1988

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert PIX to MTV?

Converting from PIX to MTV bridges the gap between specialized early 3D animation and VFX formats and standard image workflows.

What programs open MTV files?

You can open MTV files with any standard image viewer. Windows Photo Viewer, macOS Preview, GIMP, and web browsers all support MTV.

Why is PIX not widely supported?

PIX belongs to the legacy Alias PowerAnimator ecosystem — a precursor to Maya. Modern 3D tools moved to different formats long ago.

What happens to uploaded files?

Your PIX files are processed on secure servers, then deleted automatically. Converted MTV files are available for 24 hours, then erased.

Does converting PIX to MTV lose quality?

Conversion preserves the quality present in the PIX original. Any limitations come from the source resolution, not from the conversion step.