Convert MPEG to APNG Online

Converting MPEG to APNG: What This Tutorial Covers

An .mpeg (or .mpg) file is an MPEG program stream — MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video with an MP2 audio track, the format DVDs, VCDs and older broadcast captures used. APNG is an animated image: no audio, no seek bar, but full 24-bit colour and lossless frames. This tutorial covers the one thing that trips everybody up on this conversion — the APNG tool has no trim control and no file-size control, so a long source becomes an enormous file unless you cut the clip first.

How to Convert MPEG to APNG

1. Upload Your MPEG File: Drag your .mpeg or .mpg onto the page, or click "Add Files" to browse. Both extensions are accepted, and you can queue several clips to convert with the same settings.
2. Set the Framerate: Under "FRAMERATE", the "Framerate" dropdown starts on "10 FPS (Recommended)". Every step up multiplies the frame count — and each frame is a full lossless PNG — so 30 FPS costs roughly three times the bytes of 10 FPS for the same clip.
3. Set the Image Resolution: "Image resolution" starts on "Keep original". Switch to "Resolution Percentage", "Preset Resolutions", "Width (Keep aspect ratio)", "Height (Keep aspect ratio)" or "Width x Height" to shrink the frame — this is the single biggest lever you have over output size.
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 after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Cut the Clip Before You Convert

This page has no Trim section. Whatever duration you upload gets rendered end to end, and APNG stores every frame losslessly — there is no quality slider, no colour quantization, and no target-size field to rescue you afterwards. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a 720×576 DVD frame is about 1.2 MB of raw pixels before PNG compression, and at the default 10 FPS a 30-second clip is 300 of them.

So the working order is: trim, then convert.

• Cut first with /video-cutter, which accepts .mpeg and .mpg directly. Aim for a few seconds — APNG is a reaction-clip and UI-loop format, not a delivery format for a whole scene.
• Then drop the framerate. 10 FPS reads fine for talking heads, screen recordings and slow pans. Reserve 25-30 FPS for genuine fast motion.
• Then cap the resolution. The "Preset Resolutions" entries set height only; width follows the source aspect ratio. There is also a "Use as max resolution" toggle so a preset only downscales and never enlarges a smaller source.
• Skip APNG entirely if the clip is long. For anything past a few seconds, MPEG to GIF will be dramatically smaller — it animates too, and it adds a Colors palette control and an Image quality slider that this page does not have.

Every Control That Renders on This Page

Other image targets on xconvert expose quality sliders, palettes and DPI. This one does not — here is the full surface, so you are not hunting for a control that isn't there.

APNG vs GIF vs WebP for a Clip Taken From Video

APNG is not a bolt-on any more: it was folded into the PNG Specification, Third Edition, a W3C Recommendation published 24 June 2025, which defines the acTL, fcTL and fdAT animation chunks and the image/apng media type. Because those chunks are ancillary, a decoder that doesn't understand them renders the first frame as an ordinary PNG rather than failing.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The APNG is tens of megabytes" — Expected for anything longer than a few seconds, because every frame is stored losslessly. Cut the source with /video-cutter, drop to 10 FPS, and scale the frame down under "Image resolution".
• "The animation has no sound" — APNG is an image format and cannot carry an audio track. Your MPEG's MP2 audio is discarded. If you need sound, convert to MPEG to MP4 instead.
• "Horizontal comb lines on every moving edge" — Your source is interlaced, which most DVD and broadcast MPEG-2 is. We do not deinterlace, so the field-combing is baked into every extracted frame. Deinterlace in a desktop editor first if the combing matters.
• "The picture looks horizontally squashed" — Anamorphic DVD material stores 16:9 content in a 720×576 or 720×480 frame using non-square pixels. The conversion normalises pixels to square without correcting the display aspect. Set the intended shape yourself with "Width x Height" — for example 1024×576 for 16:9 PAL content.
• "It only shows one frame" — The viewer you opened it in has no APNG support, so it is rendering the base PNG. Open it in a current browser, or use MPEG to GIF for that audience.
• "The colours look washed out" — HDR or wide-gamut sources get a plain colour conversion with no tone mapping. Standard-dynamic-range MPEG sources are unaffected.

When This Doesn't Work

APNG is the wrong target for anything with a runtime. If you are trying to publish a whole scene, a tutorial recording or a music clip, no combination of framerate and resolution will make a lossless frame sequence competitive with a real video codec — convert to MPEG to MP4 or MPEG to WebM instead. Copy-protected discs and truncated captures are also out of scope: if the program stream has no clean frame boundaries, the decoder cannot extract frames at all, and the fix is to re-export a clean source rather than to change a setting here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my APNG so much bigger than the MPEG it came from?

Because the two use opposite strategies. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are lossy interframe codecs — most frames are stored as motion-compensated differences from a neighbour. APNG stores complete lossless images. Converting therefore throws away the compression that made the source small. The three levers that actually help are shorter duration, lower framerate and smaller frame dimensions, in that order.

Does the MPEG to APNG converter have a trim or cut option?

No. There is no Trim section on this page, so the entire uploaded clip is rendered. Trim the source first with /video-cutter, which accepts .mpeg and .mpg, then bring the shortened clip back here. This is the most common reason people end up with an unexpectedly huge APNG.

Will the APNG loop forever, or play once?

It loops indefinitely. Our assembler writes the animation with a loop count of zero, which the APNG specification defines as infinite repetition, so the clip restarts on its own in any viewer that supports the format.

Can I reduce the colours to shrink the file, like a GIF palette?

Not on this page — no palette or colour-reduction control renders for MPEG to APNG, and the frames keep full truecolour. We do run a Zopfli-based APNG optimiser over the assembled file automatically, but that is lossless recompression, not quantization. If palette reduction is what you actually want, convert to MPEG to GIF instead: it animates the same way and does expose a "Colors" control alongside an "Image quality (%)" slider. To shrink an APNG you already have, compress APNG offers target file size, quality percentage and resolution controls.

What framerate should I pick for a DVD-era MPEG clip?

Start at the 10 FPS default. PAL DVD material runs at 25 fps and NTSC at roughly 29.97 fps, so 10 FPS already discards most frames — which is exactly what keeps the file manageable. Raise it to 25 or 30 FPS only when the motion genuinely breaks up, and never above the source's own rate, which just duplicates frames and adds bytes for nothing.

Will the APNG have a transparent background?

No. MPEG video has no alpha channel, so every pixel arriving from the source is opaque and the resulting APNG is opaque too. APNG supports 8-bit alpha and our image pipeline preserves transparency when the input actually has some — but nothing here can invent transparency that a video frame never carried.

Which browsers and apps can play an APNG?

Native support is around 96% of global browser usage: Chrome 59+, Firefox 3+, Safari 8+ and Edge 79+ all animate it, per caniuse. Where support is missing — legacy Internet Explorer, some older image viewers and many chat clients — the file still opens and displays its first frame as a static PNG, so it degrades rather than breaks.

How does the conversion handle my file, and how long is it kept?

Your .mpeg uploads over an encrypted connection and is decoded on our servers: we extract frames at the framerate you chose, scale them during extraction, assemble them into the APNG, then run a lossless optimisation pass. Both your upload and the finished .apng are deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no account, no watermark, and files are never shared or made public.