Video to GIF Converter

About the Video to GIF Converter

Make an animated GIF from a few seconds of any video — a reaction, a product demo, a bug report or a screen recording for a README, chat or email, where a video would not play. Choose the start and end, then the frame rate (5–30 fps), width, speed, how often it loops, how many colours it may use and the dithering. The page estimates the file size from sample frames before you start, so you can trade quality for size before waiting.

The video is decoded in your browser; colour reduction and GIF encoding run in a background worker (with the gifenc encoder), and pixels that do not change between frames are stored as transparent, which keeps GIFs of mostly still scenes small. Nothing is uploaded and there is no watermark.

Which settings make a GIF small?

A GIF stores every frame as an image with at most 256 colours, so its size grows with width × height × number of frames:

• Width has the biggest effect: halving it leaves a quarter of the pixels in every frame.
• Frame rate: 10–15 fps looks smooth for most clips; 24–30 fps only matters for fast motion.
• Length: every second adds frames. Trim to the moment that matters.
• Colours: 64 or 128 colours are often enough for screen recordings and cartoons; photos and skin tones look best with 256.
• Dithering: None usually gives the smallest file and the sharpest edges, but gradients show bands; Ordered (a fixed pattern) and Floyd–Steinberg (error diffusion) both smooth gradients, at a similar size — which of the two is smaller depends on the clip, so compare their estimates.

How the GIF is built

Frames are taken at evenly spaced moments of the selection (every speed ÷ frame rate seconds of video). By default one set of up to 256 colours is chosen for the whole GIF from frames across the selection, which keeps colours steady; tick a separate set of colours for every frame when the scene changes a lot (it takes several times longer to make). GIF frame delays are whole hundredths of a second (GIF89a), so for frame rates such as 30 fps the delays alternate (3, 3 and 4 hundredths) to keep the exact speed. Most browsers show frames with a delay of 0.01 s or less for 0.1 s, so GIFs cannot usefully go above 50 fps; this tool offers up to 30 fps, which is smooth for almost every clip.

GIF or video?

Use a GIF where a video will not play or autoplay: many email apps, some chat and forum tools, and documentation pages that only accept images. Anywhere a video works, a short MP4 is usually many times smaller with full colour — and GIF to MP4 converts the other way.

Limitations

• Up to 1,000 frames and 1,280 px wide; long, wide, high-frame-rate GIFs are also limited by the browser’s memory.
• GIFs have no sound and at most 256 colours per frame, so photos and gradients lose some colour detail.
• Decoding needs WebCodecs (current Chrome, Edge, Safari or desktop Firefox) and a decoder for the video’s codec; HEVC needs hardware support in the browser.
• The size estimate encodes a run of up to 30 frames from the middle of the selection (all of a short one); parts that change more or less than that run make the real size differ.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.