Convert VOB to APNG Online

APNG or GIF for a Clip Off a DVD?

Anyone pulling a moment out of a .vob file is choosing between two animated-image formats, and the trade is straightforward. APNG keeps every one of the 16.7 million colours MPEG-2 encoded and stores each frame losslessly; GIF throws away all but 256 colours per frame but plays inline absolutely everywhere. For DVD footage — which is standard definition, often noisy, often interlaced and always photographic — that means APNG looks noticeably cleaner and lands noticeably larger. Convert to APNG when the clip has gradients, skin tones or fine detail that GIF would band; stay on VOB to GIF when it has to embed in a forum post, a chat window or an email. If the clip is longer than a few seconds, neither is the right answer — VOB to MP4 is.

Side-by-side: APNG vs GIF vs MP4 for VOB Footage

When APNG Wins

• The clip has gradients, sky, skin tones or film grain that GIF's 256-colour quantisation turns into visible banding and dither noise.
• You intend to composite the loop over a coloured background later. APNG's 8-bit alpha gives clean anti-aliased edges once you mask it; GIF's 1-bit transparency leaves a jagged halo.
• The destination is a modern web page where the fallback for the small remainder of browsers — a static first frame — is perfectly acceptable.
• You want a lossless record of the decoded frames rather than a palette approximation of them.

When It Doesn't

• The clip is more than a handful of seconds. APNG has no motion prediction across the timeline, so five seconds costs roughly five times what one second costs.
• The destination is Discord, Slack, a forum or an HTML email, where an APNG is often treated as a still image even when the underlying engine could animate it.
• The footage is mostly flat colour — a title card, an animated logo — where a 256-colour palette costs you nothing visible and GIF is smaller.
• You need the audio. No animated-image format carries a soundtrack.

How to Convert VOB to APNG

1. Upload Your VOB File: Drag a .vob from the disc's VIDEO_TS folder onto the page, or use the file picker. Note that DVD authoring splits a title across files of at most 1 GB — VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB and so on — so the moment you want may live in a later file than you expect.
2. Set the Framerate: In Advanced Options the Framerate dropdown opens on "10 FPS (Recommended)" and runs from "1 FPS (Slideshow)" to "50 FPS (Max Speed)". It sets both the sampling rate and the playback delay, so the animation keeps real-time speed at any value.
3. Set Image resolution — and fix the DVD aspect here: The control starts on "Keep original". For 4:3 or 16:9 DVD footage, choose Width x Height and type the display dimensions rather than picking a height preset; the table below has the four values you need.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the animated PNG. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

The DVD Aspect-Ratio Table You Actually Need

DVD-Video stores non-square pixels. A frame is always 720 pixels wide and 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL) tall, and the player stretches it at display time using the aspect flag in the stream. PNG frames are square-pixel with no flag to carry, so whatever is stored is what you see — which is why a native-resolution export of a 16:9 DVD looks horizontally squeezed. Enter these under Width x Height instead:

A height preset such as "480p" will not do this for you — it scales the stored geometry, not the intended display geometry, so a squashed frame stays squashed at a smaller size.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my widescreen DVD clip come out horizontally squashed?

Because DVD-Video is anamorphic: 16:9 material is stored in the same 720-pixel-wide frame as 4:3 material and stretched back out by the player. A measured NTSC VOB reports a 720 × 480 frame with an 8:9 sample aspect ratio for 4:3 content, and 16:9 discs use a wider ratio on the same frame. PNG has no field for that ratio, so the stored pixels are what land in the file. Set Width x Height explicitly using the table above and the proportions come out right.

Will the DVD's audio, subtitles or menus come through?

No. APNG is a picture format with no audio track, and the subpicture subtitle streams and navigation packets that a VOB also carries have nowhere to go either. Only the video frames are converted. If you need sound, or burned-in subtitles, convert the segment with VOB to MP4 instead, which keeps the audio track.

My VOB won't convert at all. What's wrong?

The most likely cause is CSS encryption. Commercially pressed DVD-Video discs are usually scrambled, and a VOB copied straight off such a disc is unreadable to any decoder that does not handle the encryption. Home-authored discs, camcorder DVDs and unencrypted rips convert normally. A file that was truncated during copying — a common outcome of dragging from a scratched disc — will also fail or stop partway.

How much of the file gets converted?

All of it. There is no trim control on this page, so a full VOB becomes frames from beginning to end, and given that DVD files run to 1 GB apiece the result would be unusable. Cut the seconds you want first with the video cutter, which accepts .vob directly, then bring the short clip here.

Why do moving edges look combed or striped?

Because a great deal of DVD content is interlaced — 480i or 576i — and no deinterlacing filter is applied anywhere in this pipeline. Each decoded frame contains two interleaved fields captured a fraction of a second apart, and on horizontal motion that shows as comb teeth. There is no setting here that removes it; deinterlace the source before uploading if the combing is visible.

Does APNG keep any transparency from the DVD?

There is none to keep. MPEG-2 as used on DVD-Video has no alpha channel, so the output is fully opaque. APNG's 8-bit alpha is preserved when a source actually has it — an alpha-carrying master such as ProRes 4444 comes through with its opacity values intact — but a disc rip is never that source.

How many times will the finished file loop?

Indefinitely. The animation control chunk is written with a play count of zero, which the PNG specification defines as infinite repetition, and there is no loop-count setting on this page. To make a clip play once you would have to rewrite that chunk with a dedicated APNG utility, or move to a video format where repetition is up to the player.

Is APNG really lossless if the DVD was already compressed?

The APNG stage is lossless — once the MPEG-2 frames are decoded, nothing further is discarded, and the final Zopfli optimisation pass rewrites the compressed data without touching a pixel. But it can only preserve what MPEG-2 gave it. DVD video was encoded at roughly 3 to 9 Mbit/s in the late 1990s, so blocking, mosquito noise and colour banding are already baked into the decoded frames. APNG faithfully stores those artefacts at full colour depth instead of adding GIF's palette banding on top of them.