Convert MPG to APNG Online

MPG to APNG: What You Get, and What It Costs

APNG turns a stretch of your .mpg or .mpeg video into a looping animation made of full-colour, lossless PNG frames. That is its great strength over GIF — 24-bit colour and real alpha instead of a 256-colour palette — and it is also the reason APNG files get very large very quickly. This tutorial covers the two controls this page gives you, what they do to the file size, and the one thing you should do before uploading a long recording.

How to Convert MPG to APNG

1. Upload Your MPG File: Drag and drop your .mpg or .mpeg clip, or click "+ Add Files". Every frame of the whole file becomes part of the animation, so upload a short clip rather than a long recording.
2. Choose a Video Framerate: The Framerate dropdown runs from 1 FPS (Slideshow) to 50 FPS (Max Speed) and defaults to 10 FPS (Recommended). This is the single biggest lever on file size — each step up adds proportionally more frames.
3. Set the Image resolution: Keep original is the default. Resolution Percentage, Preset Resolutions (with a "Use as max resolution" toggle), Width, Height and Width x Height are the alternatives, and scaling down is your second size lever.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared.

Walk-through: Framerate and Resolution Are Your Only Size Levers

There is no quality slider, no colour-count control, and no compression level on this page — an APNG is lossless by definition, so there is no quality to trade away. What you can change is how many frames there are and how big each one is, and those two numbers multiply.

• Halve the framerate before you halve the resolution. Going from 20 FPS to 10 FPS removes half the frames outright. Most short clips of people or objects read fine at 10-12 FPS.
• Scale to the size it will actually be displayed at. A 540-pixel-wide animation embedded at 320 pixels wide is paying for pixels nobody sees. Preset Resolutions sets height and lets width follow; Width x Height gives you exact control.
• Use "Use as max resolution" when batching. With that toggle on, the preset acts as a ceiling instead of a target, so clips already smaller than the preset are left alone rather than upscaled.
• Cut the clip first. This page has no trim control, so the entire uploaded file is animated. Video Cutter accepts .mpg and .mpeg and is the right place to isolate the two seconds you actually want.

APNG vs GIF From the Same Video

If size matters more than colour fidelity, MPG to GIF is the better tool for the same source material.

What the Conversion Actually Produces

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The file is enormous" — expected, and the fix is upstream. Cut the clip shorter, drop the framerate, and scale the resolution down before converting.
• "It shows as a still picture in some app" — that viewer does not support APNG, and the defined fallback is to display the first frame. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all animate it correctly.
• "Motion looks choppy" — 10 FPS is the default and it is a deliberate size compromise. Raise the framerate to 15, 20 or 25 and accept a proportionally bigger file.
• "There are horizontal comb lines on moving objects" — the MPEG-2 source is interlaced. There is no deinterlacing anywhere in this conversion, so the field artifacts become part of every frame. Deinterlace in a video editor first.
• "My widescreen clip looks squashed" — anamorphic DVD material stores a 720x480 or 720x576 raster that is meant to be stretched at playback. Image viewers size by pixel count, so set Width x Height to the display dimensions instead: 854 x 480 for 16:9 NTSC, 1024 x 576 for 16:9 PAL.
• "There is no sound" — there never will be. Extract the audio separately with MPG to MP3 if you need it.

When This Doesn't Work

APNG is the wrong answer for anything long. A one-minute clip at the default framerate is 600 truecolour frames, and no amount of Zopfli fixes that — the format has no interframe motion compensation the way a video codec does. Past a few seconds of footage, what you actually want is a video file: MPG to MP4 for something that plays everywhere, or MPG to WebM for a web-native loop that can autoplay silently in a <video> tag at a fraction of the size. Reserve APNG for short, high-fidelity loops where colour banding would be obvious.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much bigger than my video will the APNG be?

Usually bigger, often much bigger. In our testing, a six-second clip converted at the default 10 FPS and scaled to 360p produced 62 lossless frames that assembled into a 3.5 MB APNG after the Zopfli pass — from a source .mpeg of 3.9 MB that held the full 720x480 raster at its original framerate. Detailed, high-motion footage compresses worst; flat graphics and screen recordings compress far better.

Can I set the number of colours or a quality level?

Not on this page. The only controls that render for this conversion are Framerate and Image resolution. There is no palette size, no quality percentage, and no compression level, because the output is truecolour and lossless by construction. If you want palette reduction to shrink the file, that is what MPG to GIF does.

Can I convert just part of the video?

Not from this page — there is no trim control here, so the full uploaded clip is animated end to end. Cut the section you want first with Video Cutter, which accepts .mpg and .mpeg directly, then upload the short result. This is the single most useful habit for keeping APNG output manageable.

Does the APNG loop, and can I stop it looping?

It loops forever, and there is no control on this page to change that. The animation is assembled with an infinite loop count, which is the behaviour almost everyone wants for a short clip on a web page. If you need a single playthrough, you would need to edit the loop count in the file afterwards with a dedicated APNG tool.

Why does my APNG animate in Chrome but not in some other app?

Because APNG support is a browser and application feature, not a guarantee of the PNG format. caniuse currently puts browser support at 95.94% — Chrome from 59, Firefox from 3, Safari from 8, Edge from 79. Anywhere it is unsupported, the file is still a valid PNG and the defined behaviour is to show the first frame as a still image, so it degrades gracefully rather than breaking.

APNG or GIF — which should I actually use?

Use GIF when the file has to be small or has to work in every chat app and legacy tool. Use APNG when colour fidelity matters: gradients, skin tones, screen recordings with anti-aliased text, or anything where GIF's 256-colour palette would produce visible banding. APNG also has real 8-bit alpha, so soft edges stay soft instead of getting the hard fringe GIF gives you.

Which framerate should I pick?

10 FPS is the default and a reasonable starting point for most footage. Go to 15-25 FPS for fast motion where 10 looks stuttery, and drop to 5 or fewer for slideshow-style material where each frame is meant to be read. Remember the frame count is linear in framerate, so 25 FPS costs two and a half times what 10 FPS costs for the same clip.

Does transparency from the source survive?

There is nothing to survive. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video carries no alpha channel, so every frame decoded from a .mpg is a fully opaque rectangle. APNG can store 8-bit alpha, and that capability matters when the source is an alpha-capable format — it just does not apply to MPEG program streams.