Video Converter

Which format you actually want

MP4 is the answer unless you have a specific reason otherwise. H.264 video with AAC audio plays on every phone, browser, TV and editing program in use. If something rejected your video, MP4 is almost certainly what it wanted.

WebM uses VP9 and Opus, and is smaller than MP4 at the same quality — good for a video embedded in a web page, less good for sending to someone who will open it in whatever their computer defaults to. MOV is the same H.264 content in Apple's container, for older Mac software that insists on it. AVI is a legacy format; pick it only when something old demands it.

GIFs are done properly here

Converting video to GIF is where most converters produce something disappointing, and the reason is technical but worth knowing. A GIF can only hold 256 colours. A one-pass conversion picks those colours from a fixed generic palette, so gradients band, skin tones go grey, and the result looks cheap.

This tool runs two passes instead. The first analyses your actual footage and builds a palette from the colours it contains; the second re-renders the video using that palette, with high-quality scaling. The same clip comes out visibly cleaner — and the difference is largest on exactly the footage people turn into GIFs, which is video of faces and screens.

Two settings control GIF size, and the quality dropdown is not one of them. Frame rate offers 5, 10 or 15 fps: 10 is the default and reads as smooth for most clips, while 5 halves the size and looks choppier. Width offers 320, 480 or 640 pixels. GIFs get large very quickly, so keep clips short — a few seconds, not a minute — and drop the width before the frame rate if you need to save space.

What the quality setting covers

High, Medium and Low set the compression level for MP4, WebM and MOV, with Medium the default and a good balance. They do not affect GIF, where frame rate and width do that job, and they do not affect AVI, which uses a fixed older codec. So if you pick AVI or GIF, the quality dropdown is not the control you are looking for.

What running in the browser costs

The first time you use any video tool here your browser downloads the FFmpeg engine, about 25MB, cached afterwards. Conversion then runs on your own processor: fine for short clips, slow for long ones on an older device, and GIF conversion is the heaviest of the lot because of the two passes. A laptop handles large files far more comfortably than a phone.

Related tools

Video Compressor reduces the file size without changing format. Trim Video shortens a clip before you convert it — always worth doing before making a GIF — and Video to MP3 takes only the audio.