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Video to GIF Converter — Trim, Resize and Make High-Quality GIFs

Turn an MP4, MOV or WebM clip into a palette-optimised GIF. Trim on a preview, set width, fps and looping. Nothing is uploaded.

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This video to GIF converter turns a clip from an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV file into an animated GIF without uploading it anywhere. Drop the video in, drag the handles on the preview to the part you want, choose the width and frame rate, and the GIF is made on your own computer by ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. Screen recordings, product demos and reaction clips all work, and there is no size cap, watermark or queue.

The quality difference comes from the palette. A GIF can hold at most 256 colours per frame, so the converter first scans the whole clip to build a palette tuned to it, then maps every frame onto that palette with the dithering you choose. Converters that skip this pass use a generic palette and produce banding and a grey haze. The honest limits: the first run downloads the ffmpeg engine (about 32 MB, cached afterwards), and GIF is an inefficient format, so long or wide GIFs get big quickly. The size estimate tells you before you wait.

How to use

  1. Drop a video file onto the box, or click it to choose one. No file to hand? Make a 4-second sample clip.
  2. Drag the start and end handles under the player, or type exact times. The player jumps to each handle so you see the exact frame.
  3. Pick a width (480 px suits most chats and docs), a frame rate (10 fps is the usual default), speed and looping.
  4. Check the size estimate. If it warns, lower the width or frame rate, or shorten the selection.
  5. Click Make GIF, preview the result, and download it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert an MP4 to a GIF without losing quality?

Keep the width modest (480–640 px), use 10–20 fps, keep all 256 colours and let the converter build a palette for the clip (this tool always does). GIF cannot hold more than 256 colours per frame, so some loss against the video is unavoidable, but a per-clip palette with Sierra or Floyd–Steinberg dithering looks far better than a generic web palette.

Why is my GIF so large?

GIF compresses poorly compared with video: size grows with width × height × frame rate × duration. Halving the width cuts the size by roughly three quarters, and going from 20 to 10 fps roughly halves it. Grain, camera noise and dithering also inflate it; flat screen recordings compress far better than phone footage. For anything long, an MP4 is usually 5–10 times smaller at better quality.

What frame rate should a GIF use?

10 fps is the common default and looks fine for screen recordings; 15–20 fps looks smooth for motion. GIF stores frame delays in hundredths of a second, so 10, 20 and 25 fps play at exactly that speed, while 12 or 15 fps are rounded to the nearest hundredth. Very high rates are pointless: many browsers slow down frames shorter than 2/100 s.

Is my video uploaded to a server?

No. The file is read and converted in your browser by ffmpeg.wasm. The only download is the ffmpeg engine itself, fetched once from the jsDelivr CDN and then cached. You can watch the network tab in your browser's developer tools while converting: no request carries your video.

Can I convert a MOV from an iPhone?

Yes. iPhone .mov files are usually HEVC (H.265), which Chrome and Firefox often cannot preview, but ffmpeg can still decode them. If the preview is unavailable, type the start and end times and convert as normal. iPhones set to Most Compatible record H.264, which previews everywhere.

GIF settings and what they cost

Every setting trades smoothness or sharpness for file size. Rough rules for a typical clip:

• Width: size scales with the square. 800 px is about 2.8× the size of 480 px; 320 px is under half.

• Frame rate: size scales roughly linearly. 20 fps is about twice 10 fps.

• Colours: 128 or 64 colours save 10–30% on flat graphics and UI recordings, but band visibly on skin and skies.

• Dithering: Sierra and Floyd–Steinberg hide banding but add noise that compresses badly; Bayer's regular pattern compresses better; None is smallest and right for flat UI.

• Speed: 2× speed halves the number of frames for the same clip, so it also halves the size.

Size limits where GIFs end up

Common limits worth knowing before you convert: X (Twitter) accepts GIFs up to 15 MB on the web; Discord's free upload limit is 10 MB per file; GitHub READMEs render any size, but a GIF over a few MB makes the page slow; Slack accepts large files but only autoplays reasonably small GIFs inline. Many platforms quietly convert uploaded GIFs into MP4 video anyway, which is why an MP4 or WebM is often the better file to post when the platform accepts video.

Why the palette pass matters

A GIF frame is an indexed image: every pixel is a number pointing into a table of at most 256 colours. Which 256 colours you choose decides how the GIF looks. A fixed palette (the old 216-colour web palette, or a generic one) wastes most of its entries on colours your clip never uses and lacks the shades it does use, which shows up as bands across gradients and a dull cast over everything.

This tool uses ffmpeg's palettegen filter to count which colours actually occur across the selected frames (weighting the parts that change, which is where the eye looks), builds the best 256-colour table for this clip, then paletteuse remaps each frame with error-diffusion dithering and only redraws the rectangle that changed between frames, which also keeps the file smaller.

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