MP4 to GIF Converter

GIFs play automatically and loop everywhere — in Slack, Discord, GitHub issues, e-mail and old forums that refuse video. This converter turns an MP4 (or part of one) into a GIF inside your browser, using ffmpeg's two-pass palette method so colours stay faithful. The engine is a one-time download of about 30 MB, and your clip is never uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose an MP4 file (M4V and other video formats also work).
2. Set the start time and the number of seconds to use.
3. Pick the frame rate and width; lower values give much smaller files.
4. Choose colours, dithering, speed and looping, then press Calculate and download the GIF.

Formula

Frames = length ÷ speed × fps · pixels per frame = width × height

A GIF stores every frame as an indexed image of up to 256 colours with LZW compression, which is far less efficient than MP4's video coding. The palette is computed from the whole clip, and each frame stores only the rectangle that changed from the previous one.

Example

A 3-second screen recording at 10 fps and 480 px wide gives 3 × 10 = 30 frames; with flat interface colours it is usually 0.5–1.5 MB. The same 3 seconds of camera footage with 256 colours and Floyd–Steinberg dithering can reach 4–6 MB.

Getting under a size limit

Chat apps, forums and issue trackers limit uploads (GitHub, for example, accepts GIFs up to 10 MB in issues and comments). To get under a limit, lower the width first — it affects size the most — then the frame rate, then the number of colours. Trimming a second off the clip helps too.