Video to GIF
Convert MP4, WebM, MOV or any video to an animated GIF: choose start, duration, FPS and size with sliders
Turn an Oversized Video Clip Into a Shareable GIF
A 30-second screen recording from your phone can easily land at 20-40MB as an MP4, which is too big for Slack's free tier, gets compressed into mush by Discord, or simply refuses to attach in iMessage. Converting the clip to a GIF sidesteps all of that, because GIFs are embedded inline and play automatically without anyone tapping a video player. This tool takes any video file, lets you pick the exact moment you want with a dual-handle slider sitting under a live preview, and renders that segment as a looping GIF. Drag the left handle to move the start point, the right handle to move the end point, or drag the middle of the selection to shift the whole window without changing its length.
The conversion itself runs through FFmpeg's palettegen and paletteuse filter chain, compiled to WebAssembly so it executes inside your browser tab rather than on a remote server. Palettegen analyzes the selected frames and builds a custom 256-color palette tuned to that specific clip, then paletteuse applies it with dithering when re-encoding. This two-step approach produces noticeably better color fidelity than the single fixed palette many quick online converters use, especially on clips with skin tones, gradients, or text overlays. Clip length matters a lot here: a segment under 6 seconds keeps the frame count manageable, so the palette stays accurate and the resulting file stays a reasonable size. Push past 10-15 seconds and both the encode time and output size grow quickly, since every additional frame needs its own palette-matched pixels.
How to Use
- 1
Load your video
Drop in an MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI, or MKV file. Playback starts right away so you can scrub through and find the part worth keeping.
- 2
Drag the slider handles to your segment
The left and right handles set the start and end points. Dragging the middle of the highlighted region moves both at once, keeping the duration fixed.
- 3
Adjust FPS and width
Lower frame rates and smaller widths shrink the output. For most clips, somewhere between 10 and 15 FPS keeps motion looking natural without ballooning the file.
- 4
Convert and check the result
The selected segment is processed locally and a preview appears. If the file is bigger than expected, trim the segment further or reduce the width.
Key Features
- →Segments under 6 seconds usually produce the best balance of quality and file size, since the palette has fewer frames to cover.
- →MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI, and MKV are all accepted as source files.
- →The output is always a standard animated GIF that loops by default.
- →If the GIF still feels too large for where you're posting it, run it through the Optimize GIF tool afterward for another pass of compression.
- →Trimming to just the moment that matters, rather than the whole clip, almost always beats lowering FPS for reducing file size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the GIF file bigger than the original video clip?
Video codecs like H.264 compress by predicting how frames change over time, while GIF stores something closer to a sequence of indexed-color images. A 6-second GIF can end up several times larger than the MP4 it came from, even though it covers a shorter span and looks lower quality.
Can I select a segment from the very end of the video?
Yes, drag the right handle all the way to the end of the timeline. The selection bar shows the exact start and end times as you adjust it.
Does dragging the middle of the slider change the clip length?
No, dragging the middle moves the whole selection window forward or backward while keeping the same duration between the two handles.
Will the GIF include the audio from my video?
No, the GIF format doesn't support audio tracks at all, so the sound from your clip is dropped during conversion regardless of settings.
What's the practical limit on clip length before the file gets unwieldy?
There's no hard cutoff enforced by the tool, but past roughly 10-15 seconds the frame count and palette complexity both increase enough that file sizes can jump from a few hundred KB to tens of megabytes.
Last updated: June 2026