GIF to MP4
Turn an animated GIF into a video, usually a fraction of the size.
- Runs on your device — the file is never sent anywhere
- No sign-up, no watermarks, no daily quotas
- Free, with no limit on how often you use it
How it works
GIF is a thirty-year-old image format doing a job it was never designed for. A short animation that costs several megabytes as a GIF is often a couple of hundred kilobytes as an MP4, looking better, because video compression can describe what changed between frames while GIF stores each one almost whole.
Why the saving is so large
GIF has no inter-frame compression worth the name and is limited to 256 colours. H.264 encodes the differences between frames and keeps full colour, so it is both smaller and better looking on the same material. Reductions of ninety per cent are common.
Where MP4 works and GIF still does not
Every social platform, messaging app and browser plays MP4 — several convert uploaded GIFs to video behind the scenes anyway. GIF still wins in the narrow cases where a file must be an image: some email clients, some forums, and anywhere autoplay video is blocked.
Odd dimensions are handled
H.264 needs both dimensions to be even, and GIFs frequently have odd ones. The picture is trimmed by a single pixel where necessary, which is never visible.
Looping
Video does not carry GIF's built-in loop count, so looping is up to the player. Repeating the animation a few times inside the file is offered as a rough substitute for very short clips.
GIF to MP4 — questions
How much smaller will the MP4 be?
Often a tenth of the GIF or less, and usually better looking too.
Will it loop like the GIF did?
That depends on the player, since video has no loop flag. You can repeat the animation inside the file instead.
Why did the size change by one pixel?
H.264 requires even dimensions, so an odd width or height is trimmed by one.
Is my GIF uploaded?
No. The conversion runs in your browser.