GIF to Video

Why this is almost always worth doing

A GIF is a poor way to store moving pictures, and the numbers are not close.

The format dates from 1987 and was designed for small graphics, not video. It is limited to 256 colours per frame, which is why gradients in a GIF look banded and why video converted to GIF develops a dithered, speckled texture. And it has almost no real compression: every frame is stored more or less independently, with none of the frame-to-frame prediction that makes modern video efficient.

The practical consequence is that the same few seconds of motion is commonly five to ten times larger as a GIF than as an MP4, and it looks worse. A 12 MB GIF becoming a 1.5 MB MP4 is an ordinary result, not a best case.

Which is why the platforms noticed. Several social networks and messaging apps have converted uploaded GIFs to video behind the scenes for years — what you post as a GIF is served to other people as an MP4. Converting it yourself just means you control the result and upload a far smaller file.

The one place a GIF still wins

Being straight about it, because it is the reason not to convert.

A GIF plays by itself, everywhere, with no player. It is an image as far as any software is concerned, so it animates in an email, in a chat window, in an old forum post, in a document, in a presentation — anywhere an image can appear.

Video does not have that guarantee. Email is the clear case: essentially no email client will play an embedded video, so an animated GIF is still the only way to get motion into a marketing email or a newsletter. Same for some wikis, some CMS image fields, and anywhere that accepts images but not video.

So: for a web page, a social post, a chat app or a Slack message, convert. For an email, keep the GIF and make it as small as you can instead.

Will it still loop?

The most common worry, and the answer depends on where it goes rather than on the file.

A GIF carries a loop instruction inside it. An MP4 does not — looping is decided by whatever plays it. In practice that is rarely a problem, because the players people actually use loop short clips: a <video> tag with the loop attribute, the inline players on the major social networks, and the preview players in most chat apps all do.

If you are putting it on your own page, add loop, autoplay, muted and playsinline to the video tag — the last two are what allow autoplay at all on mobile, since browsers block video that could make noise.

MP4 or WebM

MP4 is the default and the right choice almost always. Every browser, phone, editor and platform plays it, and it is what you want for anything being uploaded or shared.

The MP4 here is produced with two settings worth knowing about. It uses the widely compatible colour format that older players and hardware decoders need — a detail that trips up a lot of conversions and produces files that play in a browser but not on a TV or in an editor. And it is written so that playback can start before the whole file has downloaded, which matters when the video sits on a web page.

WebM uses a more modern codec and can be slightly smaller at the same quality. It plays in every current browser but has patchier support outside them — some editors, older devices and a few apps will not open it. Choose it when the destination is a web page you control and size is the priority.

Scaling while you convert

Three options, and the right one is usually Original.

Half size is worth considering for a screen-recorded GIF, which is often captured far larger than it will ever be displayed. Halving the dimensions removes three quarters of the pixels and shrinks the file dramatically.

2× larger adds no detail — the extra pixels are interpolated from what was there. It has one legitimate use: a small pixel-art or low-resolution GIF that you want displayed large without the browser blurring it. Otherwise leave it alone.

Dimensions are rounded to even numbers, because the video encoder requires it.

Nothing is uploaded, which matters more here than usual

GIFs are big. On every other converter, the slowest part of the job is pushing a 20 MB file up to a server, waiting in a queue and pulling the result back. Here the conversion happens on your own machine, so there is no upload, no queue and no file size limit set by somebody else.

There is no watermark either, which several free converters in this category add unless you sign up.

One cost to be aware of: the video engine has to load into your browser the first time you use it — a one-off download of a few tens of megabytes, cached afterwards. For a single small GIF, that initial load may take longer than the conversion.

Related tools

Video to GIF does the reverse, with a two-pass palette to make the GIF as good as the format allows. Video Compressor reduces the finished video further, and Create Video Loop repeats a short clip if you want a longer loop.