Make a GIF from a video

How to use the Video to GIF converter

1. Add the video: a phone MOV, an MP4 download, a WebM screen capture, an MKV or an AVI.
2. Type the start and end of the moment, in seconds or minutes:seconds.
3. Choose a width and frame rate. The defaults, 480 pixels wide and 12 frames a second, suit most chats.
4. Convert to GIF and download it.

A palette made for your clip

A GIF frame can only use 256 colours. In a first pass the converter studies the whole selected range and builds one palette for it, favouring the areas that move. In the second pass every frame is mapped onto that palette with ordered dithering, which stays steady instead of shimmering from frame to frame.

Only the parts of the picture that change are rewritten after the first frame, so still backgrounds cost very little. The GIF repeats endlessly.

Keeping it postable

GIF is a heavy format, often 5–10 times the size of the same moment as MP4. File size rises with the square of the width and with the frame rate, so dropping from 640 to 320 px leaves roughly a quarter of the bytes.

Short is the secret: a moment of a few seconds at 10–15 frames a second usually lands in a size chats accept. Lowering Colours under More settings to 64 or 32 helps flat screen recordings.

How it runs

The clip is decoded by ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. That engine, around 31 MB, downloads once from jsDelivr and is cached for later visits.

A long source is fine, because only the stretch between your start and end is read and encoded. Width is never scaled above the original.

Questions