AVCHD to ICO Converter

Convert AVCHD to ICO Online

An AVCHD clip is high-definition camcorder video — MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 pictures wrapped in an MPEG-2 transport stream — and this tool freezes one frame of it into a Windows .ico icon. You choose the moment with a timestamp, and that frame is written out at icon scale for a desktop shortcut, an application icon, or a classic favicon.ico. The constraint worth knowing before you start: an ICO image entry stores its width and height in a single byte, so 256 pixels is the largest size the format addresses. A 1920×1080 camcorder frame is therefore scaled down about seven times on each side, and only a simple, high-contrast subject survives that trip.

How to Convert AVCHD to ICO

1. Upload Your AVCHD File: Drag and drop the .MTS or .M2TS clip from your camcorder onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse for it. You can queue several clips and each is processed with the same settings.
2. Pick the Frame: Frame Selection opens on "Specific Frame" with Time (seconds) set to 0, which captures the very first frame. Type a timestamp such as 2.100 (2 seconds and 100 milliseconds) to land somewhere else, or switch to "Multiple Screenshots" and set a Capture Rate to sample icons across the whole clip.
3. Set the Image resolution: "Preset Resolutions" is the only sizing mode on an ICO target, and it opens on 256P — the list runs 256P, 192P, 180P, 128P, 64P, 48P, 32P, 24P and 16P. There is no percentage, "Keep original" or Width x Height box here, so pick a smaller preset when you want a physically smaller icon file.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .ico. Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

What the Converter Does to Your Frame

The job runs in two stages. First the requested frame is decoded out of the H.264 stream and written as a lossless PNG, so nothing is thrown away at the point of capture. Then that PNG is encoded into the icon file, scaled so its height matches the preset with the aspect ratio preserved. Two consequences follow from that, and they surprise people:

• The icon is not square. A 16:9 camcorder frame at the default 256P lands at 455×256 rather than 256×256, because the preset sets the height and the width follows the frame's shape. Crop the still to a square first if you need a square icon — Crop Image does that job.
• It is a single-size icon. An .ico file can hold several images at different sizes, but the one produced here contains one image at the size you chose. Windows and browsers will rescale it as needed.

AVCHD vs ICO at a Glance

Icon Sizes and Where Windows Uses Them

Microsoft's own icon documentation notes that Windows imposes no restriction on icon sizes, but that 16, 32, and 48 pixels square are the common ones, and encourages developers to ship at least those three. Here is how the size you pick maps to what you will actually see:

Frequently Asked Questions

What size icon do I get if I leave the resolution setting alone?

The Image resolution control on this page offers only the preset list, and it opens on 256P, which sets the icon's height to 256 and lets the width follow the frame's aspect ratio — a 1920×1080 clip produces a 455×256 icon and a 1440×1080 clip a 341×256 one. Both are wider than an ICO entry can declare: the icon directory records each image's width and height in a single byte, capped at 256, so readers that trust the directory misinterpret the file. For widescreen camcorder footage, pick 128P (228×128) or crop the still square first.

Which frame does the converter grab if I never touch the timestamp?

The first one. Frame Selection opens on "Specific Frame" with Time (seconds) at 0, so an untouched conversion captures frame zero of the clip. Camcorders often start recording a beat before the interesting part, so it is worth scrubbing the clip in a player, reading off a better timestamp, and typing it in — decimals are accepted, so 12.250 targets 12.25 seconds.

Why does my icon look soft or blocky compared with the video?

Two effects stack. AVCHD is H.264 at a system bitrate of up to 24 Mbps (28 Mbps for 1080p progressive recordings), so each decoded frame already carries some compression artifacts. Then the frame is reduced to at most 256 pixels on its long edge, which discards most of the fine detail. Busy scenes turn to mush; a large, simple, high-contrast subject stays legible.

Will the icon have a transparent background?

Not from a camcorder frame. The ICO format supports transparency through a mask or a 32-bit alpha channel, but video has no alpha — every pixel of an AVCHD frame is opaque, so there is nothing to preserve. To get a cut-out icon, export the frame with AVCHD to PNG, erase the background in an image editor, then build the icon with PNG to ICO.

Is the result a multi-size favicon.ico with 16, 32, and 48 px versions inside?

No. The .ico produced here holds a single image at the size you selected. That is perfectly valid — Windows and browsers scale a single-entry icon as required — but if you specifically need a multi-resolution favicon.ico, export the frame once per size and combine them in a dedicated icon editor.

Why do moving subjects show comb-like horizontal lines in the captured frame?

Because a lot of AVCHD footage is interlaced. In the 1080/60i and 1080/50i modes each stored frame is woven from two fields captured a fraction of a second apart, so anything that moved between them freezes as interleaved stripes. No deinterlacing filter is applied during capture, so the fix is to pick a low-motion frame, or shoot in one of AVCHD's progressive modes (720/60p, 720/50p, 720/24p, or 1080p on later cameras).

Should I use ICO or PNG for a website favicon?

Use ICO when something specifically wants a .ico file — a Windows desktop shortcut, an application resource, or the legacy /favicon.ico path that browsers still probe. For a modern site, a PNG referenced from a <link rel="icon"> tag is simpler to manage and scales better on high-DPI screens; AVCHD to PNG gives you that in one step. Both routes start from the same extracted frame.

How is my camcorder file handled after I upload it?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, and it is never shared or made public. In our pipeline the frame is decoded to a lossless PNG before the icon is written, so the only quality loss is the downscale to icon size. The practical limit is upload time rather than conversion time, since AVCHD clips carry full HD video; if you only need one frame from a long recording, trim the clip first. Other still and video targets for this footage are listed on the AVCHD converter hub.