Convert MKV to APNG Online

Convert MKV to APNG Online

Turn a clip from a Matroska (.mkv) video into an APNG — an animated PNG that keeps full 24-bit colour and 8-bit alpha instead of GIF's 256-colour palette, so gradients stay smooth and there is no dithering speckle. It is the right choice when fidelity matters more than bytes: UI recordings, logo animations, pixel-exact demos. The trade is size, and this page is honest about it — APNG is lossless and has no motion-compensated compression, so a long MKV becomes a very large file. Convert short clips.

How to Convert MKV to APNG

1. Upload Your MKV File: Drag the .mkv onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to choose it from your computer. Several clips can be queued at once.
2. Set the Framerate: Open Advanced Options and pick a value under Framerate — it starts on 10 FPS (Recommended). This is the single biggest lever on both smoothness and file size, because it decides how many frames get stored.
3. Set the Image Resolution: Image resolution starts on Keep original. Switch to Resolution Percentage, a Preset, or an explicit Width/Height to shrink the frame — halving the dimensions cuts the pixel count to a quarter.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and download the .apng. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark.

Keeping the File Size Under Control

There are exactly two size levers on this page — Framerate and Image resolution — and no quality slider, because APNG output here is lossless by definition. The whole video is converted: there is no trim control, so a five-minute MKV becomes five minutes of animation. That is the single most common reason people end up with an enormous file.

• Cut the clip first. Trim the section you want with the Video Cutter, then convert the short result here. This is by far the most effective fix, because file size scales almost linearly with duration.
• Drop the framerate before you drop the resolution. Going from 20 FPS to 10 FPS halves the frame count outright, and most screen recordings and UI demos read fine at 10–15 FPS.
• Scale down for the space it will actually be displayed at. An APNG shown at 480 px wide in a README gains nothing from being stored at 1080p.
• If the result is still too heavy, the format is the problem. For a web-facing animation, MKV to WebP or MKV to GIF will be dramatically smaller — GIF because it only stores 256 colours, WebP because it can compress lossily.

Framerate, Frame Delay and Frame Count

The per-frame delay is exactly the reciprocal of the framerate you choose, and the number of stored frames is what drives the file size. The last column shows how many frames a ten-second clip produces:

APNG vs GIF vs Animated WebP

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my APNG so much larger than the MKV it came from?

Because the two formats compress in completely different ways. An MKV holds video compressed with a codec like H.264 or VP9, which uses motion compensation — it stores how blocks of pixels move between frames. APNG has no such mechanism; it stores frames using PNG's lossless compression, so nothing is ever thrown away and cost scales with frames × pixels. A 30-second 1080p clip at 30 FPS is 900 full-resolution lossless frames, which is simply a lot of data. Cut the clip shorter, lower the framerate, or reduce the resolution — those are the three things that actually move the number.

Can I convert just part of a long MKV?

Not on this page — there is no trim control here, so the entire video is converted from start to finish. Cut first with the Video Cutter and then run the short excerpt through this converter. That order matters: trimming to five seconds before conversion is the difference between a manageable animation and a file so large it is unusable in a browser.

Is there a quality or colour-reduction setting?

No. The only two controls on this page are Framerate and Image resolution. APNG output here is truecolour and lossless — there is no quality percentage to trade away and no palette reduction to apply, which is precisely why it looks better than GIF and weighs more. If you need a colour-reduced animation to save space, MKV to GIF does that by design, since GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame.

Do all browsers play APNG?

Almost all of them. According to caniuse, APNG has roughly 96% global support — Chrome 59+, Firefox 3+, Safari 8+, Edge 79+ and Opera 46+ all animate it. The nice property is the failure mode: where APNG is not supported, only the first frame is displayed, so the file still renders as a normal static PNG rather than breaking the layout. Internet Explorer and Opera Mini are the notable holdouts.

Is APNG an official standard or a browser extension?

It is an official standard now. APNG began as a Mozilla extension to PNG, but it was folded into the PNG Specification, Third Edition, published as a W3C Recommendation on 24 June 2025. That specification describes APNG as extending "the original, static-only PNG format, adding support for frame-based animated images", intended as a replacement for simple animated GIFs while adding 24-bit colour and 8-bit transparency. It is also explicitly backwards-compatible: a decoder that does not understand the animation chunks just shows the static image.

Does the APNG keep transparency from my MKV?

Only if the source actually has an alpha channel. Our pipeline extracts frames in RGBA specifically so that transparency survives when it exists, and APNG's 8-bit alpha then stores it with soft edges rather than GIF's hard 1-bit cutout. In practice, though, most MKV files use codecs like H.264 or HEVC that cannot store alpha at all, so the result will be fully opaque. MKVs encoded with an alpha-capable codec such as VP8 or VP9 with alpha are the case where this matters.

Does the animation loop, and can I change how many times?

The output loops indefinitely, and there is no loop-count control on this page. That matches how APNGs are normally used on the web — an endlessly repeating loop embedded like any other image. If you need a fixed number of plays or a "play once" animation, that has to be controlled by whatever displays the file, or handled in a dedicated APNG editor after conversion.

What happens to the MKV's audio and subtitles?

Both are dropped. APNG is an image format with no audio track and no subtitle concept, so a converted clip is silent and unsubtitled — the picture is all that carries over. If you specifically wanted the sound rather than the animation, extract it with MKV to MP3; if you want a small video that keeps audio, MKV to MP4 is the right target instead.

What does the converter actually do to my frames?

Our pipeline decodes the MKV to a sequence of lossless PNG frames, resizing them during extraction if you asked for a different resolution, assembles them into an animated PNG at the exact per-frame delay implied by your framerate, and then runs a Zopfli-based APNG optimiser over the finished file to squeeze it as far as lossless compression allows. Nothing is re-quantised or dithered along the way. Your upload and the result are deleted automatically a few hours after conversion, and the original file on your own device is untouched.