Convert CAVS to APNG Online

CAVS to APNG — Is APNG the Right Animated Format?

CAVS is a raw Chinese AVS video elementary stream: the AVS1-P2 (JiZhun profile) bitstream promulgated as China's national standard GB/T 20090.2-2006, common in digital-TV and set-top-box equipment and playable in almost nothing on the open web. Turning a short section of it into an animated image makes it embeddable anywhere. The question is which animated image. APNG keeps full 24-bit colour and lossless frames, which is exactly right for a caption card, a logo sting or a UI loop — and exactly wrong for thirty seconds of live footage, where the file will be enormous. Short answer: APNG for short, graphic, colour-critical clips; GIF when ancient compatibility is the only thing that matters; MP4 when the clip is long.

APNG vs GIF vs Animated WebP

When APNG Is the Right Choice

• The clip has gradients, soft shadows or anti-aliased text, which GIF's 256-colour palette turns into visible banding and dithering noise.
• You want lossless frames — nothing is thrown away between the decoded CAVS frame and the pixel in the output.
• Graceful degradation matters: an APNG is a valid PNG, so a viewer that does not animate shows the first frame instead of a broken image.
• The animation is short. Two to five seconds is the comfortable zone.

When to Pick Something Else

• Long clips: every APNG frame is stored losslessly with no motion compensation between frames, so file size scales roughly with frame count. Past a few seconds, use CAVS to MP4, which keeps the video compressed.
• Truly universal support: CAVS to GIF still plays in old email clients, forum software and chat tools that never learned APNG.
• A single still instead of a loop: if one representative frame is all you need, CAVS to WebP pulls a frame at a timestamp you choose — or one frame every few seconds — rather than building an animation. Animation from a video source here means GIF or APNG.

How to Convert CAVS to APNG

1. Upload Your CAVS File: Drag and drop the .cavs onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Several files can be queued and converted with the same settings in one pass.
2. Set the Framerate: The Framerate dropdown starts at "10 FPS (Recommended)" and runs from 1 FPS up to 50 FPS. This is the biggest lever on output size — every extra frame per second is another full lossless image stored in the file.
3. Choose an Image Resolution (Optional): Image resolution starts on "Keep original". Switch to Resolution Percentage, a Preset Resolution such as 480p, or an explicit Width, Height or Width x Height to scale the frames down before they are encoded.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save the APNG. No sign-up, no watermark.

What Happens to Your Frames

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my APNG bigger than the CAVS video it came from?

Because you removed the compression that made the video small. AVS1, like every video codec, encodes most frames as differences from their neighbours; APNG stores each frame as a complete, losslessly compressed image. A ten-second clip at 10 FPS is a hundred full images in one file. That is a fair trade for a two-second logo loop and a terrible one for a scene of live footage — for anything longer, CAVS to MP4 is the right target, and compressing the APNG afterwards can claw back some size if you must keep the format.

Will the APNG have transparency?

Only if the source did, and a CAVS source does not. AVS1-P2 is a broadcast video codec with no alpha channel, so every frame arrives fully opaque and the APNG is opaque too. APNG's alpha support is real and it is one of the format's main advantages over GIF — it just has nothing to work with here. Transparency cannot be invented during a conversion.

Which browsers and apps actually display an APNG?

Roughly 96% of global browser usage, per caniuse: Chrome 59 and later, Firefox 3 and later, Safari 8 and later, Edge 79 and later, and Opera 46 and later. Since June 2025 APNG is not a bolt-on any more — the W3C's PNG Third Edition Recommendation folded frame-based animation into the official PNG specification, with the acTL, fcTL and fdAT chunks defined normatively. Internet Explorer never supported it.

What happens in a viewer that doesn't support APNG?

It shows the first frame as a still image. The animation chunks are ancillary, so a decoder that does not understand them ignores them and renders the base PNG underneath — the spec is explicit that a non-animation-capable decoder "will display the static image rather than the animation sequence". That graceful fallback is a real advantage over animated WebP, which simply fails to render where it is unsupported.

Should I use APNG or GIF for this clip?

Choose APNG when the picture has gradients, soft edges, anti-aliased text or subtle colour that a 256-entry palette would visibly wreck. Choose GIF when the file has to render in old email clients, legacy forum software or chat tools with no APNG support, or when the source is already flat, graphic and low-colour — in that case the palette costs you nothing and GIF will be smaller.

How do framerate and resolution change the file size?

Close to linearly for framerate and quadratically for resolution. Doubling FPS doubles the number of stored frames; halving the width and height quarters the pixels in every frame. If an APNG comes out too big, cut the framerate first — motion in a short loop usually survives 10 or 12 FPS far better than intuition suggests — then cap the width with a preset resolution.

Does the APNG loop automatically, and can I control the timing?

It loops forever with no configuration needed: our pipeline assembles the frames with apngasm, the reference assembler written by APNG's author, and sets an infinite loop count. Per-frame delay comes straight from the framerate you choose as an exact 1/N-second fraction, which is more precise than GIF's hundredth-of-a-second delay field. There is no per-frame timing editor on this page — pick the framerate that matches the pace you want.

Are my uploaded files kept or shared?

No. Your CAVS file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later. There is no sign-up and no watermark, files are never shared or made public, and nothing is done with them beyond producing your APNG.