Can Upscayl upscale video? Mac options that can

Checked against Upscayl's GitHub and the other vendors' own pages on November 9, 2026. Local Upscale Studio is in development.

Short answer: no. Upscayl is an image upscaler. It doesn't open video files. You can still use it on video by splitting the video into frames, upscaling every frame and putting them back together, but that is slow and has real drawbacks. This page explains the workaround and lists Mac apps that handle video directly.

What Upscayl's own project says

• It only opens images. The list of file types in Upscayl's source code is PNG, JPG, JPEG and WEBP.
• Video is a feature request, not a feature. The request "Upscayl Gif and Video" (issue #666) has been open since January 2024 and is labelled "not-now". A maintainer replied: "That is definitely planned but not so soon."
• The project points to a workaround. A community guide, "Upscayling videos with the help of FFMPEG", is pinned in Upscayl's GitHub discussions and linked from its wiki.
• The latest release is v2.15.0, published on December 25, 2024.

Upscayl is free and open source (AGPL-3.0) from its GitHub releases page and needs macOS 12 or later. It is also on the Mac App Store, where it costs $12.99. It runs Real-ESRGAN-style models. For photos it is a good free choice; see how to upscale photos on a Mac.

The workaround: frames in, frames out

The idea is simple. Turn the video into a folder of still images, batch-upscale the folder in Upscayl, then turn the images back into a video and add the original sound. You need ffmpeg, which is free: brew install ffmpeg.

1. Find the frame rate. You will need it when you reassemble the video.

   ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=avg_frame_rate -of default=nw=1:nk=1 input.mp4

   This prints a number such as 30000/1001 (29.97 fps). Copy it exactly.

2. Extract every frame as a PNG.

   mkdir frames upscaled && ffmpeg -i input.mp4 frames/%06d.png

3. Upscale the folder in Upscayl. Turn on batch mode, choose frames as the input folder and upscaled as the output folder, and pick a model and scale. Keep PNG as the output format. Upscayl saves the results in a new folder inside upscaled, named after the format, model and scale. Run it once, so there is only one such folder.
4. Rebuild the video, using your frame rate, and copy the audio from the original:

   ffmpeg -framerate 30000/1001 -pattern_type glob -i 'upscaled/*/*.png' -i input.mp4 -map 0:v -map "1:a?" -c:v libx265 -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy -shortest upscaled.mp4

   The quotes matter in the Mac's default shell (zsh). The pattern reads the frames from Upscayl's folder in name order. We tested these commands in zsh with ffmpeg 9.0 on macOS 27, using a short test clip and resized frames laid out the way Upscayl's batch mode saves them (checked against its source code), not Upscayl itself.

Why the workaround is a compromise

• No temporal consistency. An image model sees one frame at a time and knows nothing about the frames before and after. It can invent slightly different detail in each frame, so textures, hair and edges may shimmer or crawl when the video plays. Video models look at neighbouring frames to keep detail stable.
• Lots of files. One minute of 30 fps video is 1,800 frames. A ten-minute clip is 18,000 PNG files in each folder, and upscaled PNGs are large. Check your free disk space first, and delete both folders when you are done.
• Slow. Every frame is a full image upscale. Time one frame, multiply by the number of frames, and you have a rough idea of the wait.
• Easy to get wrong. Phone videos often use a variable frame rate, so a fixed rate on rebuild can drift out of sync with the sound over a long clip. Interlaced footage needs deinterlacing before you extract frames; see our home video guide.

For a short clip, a few seconds for a GIF or a single shot, the workaround is fine and free. For anything longer, a tool that takes video directly saves a lot of effort.

Mac options that take video directly

Prices are in US dollars, before tax, as listed on November 9, 2026. Vendors change prices often. Studio's row describes what is being built. More apps and prices: AI upscaler prices.

A few notes on choosing:

• If you liked Upscayl's results, the same family of models runs on video in several of these tools. Real-ESRGAN on a Mac covers the free options.
• If you only need a bigger file, not a sharper one, HandBrake or ffmpeg is enough. See how to upscale video to 1080p or 4K.
• If you'd rather nothing leaves your Mac, every tool in the table can process video on the Mac itself. See offline upscalers for Mac.

Where Studio fits

Local Upscale Studio is a pay-once Mac app for Apple silicon that upscales photos and video in one app. You drop in the video itself; there are no frame folders to manage.

• Fast mode uses Real-ESRGAN, the same kind of model Upscayl uses, and runs on every Apple silicon Mac.
• Quality mode uses FlashVSR for video, a model that looks at neighbouring frames. It is slow: 1.0–1.6 seconds per frame at 540p–720p output on an M5 Max with 64 GB, using 13–17 GB of memory. It will likely be offered on Macs with 24 GB or more, for short clips.
• A test on first launch picks the models your Mac can run. Nothing is uploaded.

You can see early results from our test setup. Studio isn't released yet, and we haven't published results from the finished app.

Questions

Will Upscayl add video? Its maintainers have said it is planned, "but not so soon". Watch issue #666 on GitHub for news.

Can Upscayl upscale GIFs? Not directly. A maintainer confirmed the same frame-by-frame method works for GIFs.

Is the free workaround as good as a video upscaler? Each frame can look as good as Upscayl makes a photo look. The weak point is motion: without information from neighbouring frames, detail can flicker from frame to frame.

Sources

• Upscayl: github.com/upscayl/upscayl (README, licence, macOS requirement), supported image formats, latest release
• Upscayl video request: issue #666, "Upscayl Gif and Video"
• Upscayl video workaround: "Upscayling videos with the help of FFMPEG", Upscayl wiki
• Upscayl on the Mac App Store: apps.apple.com
• Local Video Upscaler: apps.apple.com
• Topaz Video: topazlabs.com/topaz-video
• chaiNNer: github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer
• Video2X: github.com/k4yt3x/video2x
• HandBrake: resizing video; ffmpeg: ffmpeg documentation

Upscayl is an open-source project by its contributors. Topaz Labs and Topaz Video are trademarks of Topaz Labs. Mac, macOS and Mac App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc. All other names are trademarks of their owners. Local Upscale Studio is not affiliated with any of them.