Question

I tried to do this with ffmpeg but failed (i also failled making animated gifs). Is there a simple to use free program (command line is ok) to convert videos to animated pngs?

As long as it doesnt dump the video frame by frame into png files and create a monster size png then i should like it.(I didnt see an option to make ffmpeg not dump every frame)

From the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

Answer 1

Easy:

http://vdubapngmod.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

This sort of thing has been done before (with gif) using imagemagick. APNG is not an official file format - the PNG group doesn't support this extension. Even if you get this to work, you are likely going to have lingering issues. You should probably consider an animated gif, unless you have some reason you are forced to use png.

Checkout the page on Video Handling. Also take a look at Animation Basics and Optimization.

I appear to be able to convert avi to apng directly on linux, but it fails on windows. A work around on windows would be to convert the movie to a sequence of stills:

convert test.avi frame%04d.png

if you want to use ffmpeg, this will extract frames every 5 seconds:

ffmpeg -i test.avi -y -ss 5 -an -sameq -r 1/5 frame%03d.png

then making the animation by using the apng edit firefox plugin.

Answer 3

Dunno if this'll work, but try: Format Factory (formatoz.org) It's a good free all-around converter for Windows.