RaahUPSC · Video Tools
Video to GIF
Make a short looping GIF from part of a video for a slide, a chat reply or documentation. The tool builds a palette from your own clip, so colours look far better than a generic conversion.
✓ No upload · ✓ No sign-up · ✓ No watermark
How to use Video to GIF
- Choose a video in any common format (MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WebM and others).
- Set FPS (default 12) and Width in pixels (default 480). Height follows the aspect ratio.
- Type the Start second and a Duration; the default is a 5-second clip from the beginning.
- Press Make GIF and download the looping animation.
How the GIF is built
GIF can only show 256 colours per frame, so a two-pass filter is used. FFmpeg first analyses the selected frames with palettegen and picks the 128 colours that represent the clip best, then paletteuse maps every frame onto that palette with Bayer dithering. Frames are scaled with the Lanczos filter for crisp edges, and the result is set to loop forever.
GIF compresses poorly compared with any modern video format, so size grows quickly with width, frame rate and length. A 5-second clip at 480 px and 12 fps is a good starting point for slides and chats. Drop to 320 px or 8 fps for email, and keep clips short rather than raising quality.
Limitations
- GIF has no sound, and gradients or skin tones can show dithering patterns because of the limited palette.
- Long or wide GIFs become very large; a 20-second clip at full HD width can run to tens of megabytes.
- FPS and Width are free number fields, and ambitious values such as 30 fps at 1280 px can exhaust browser memory on long clips.
Frequently asked questions
What FPS and width should I choose?
For most uses 10–12 fps at 400–480 px looks smooth and stays light. Screen recordings with text may need a wider frame but tolerate a lower frame rate.
How do I make the GIF smaller?
Shorten the duration first, then lower the width, then the FPS. Each halving of width roughly quarters the pixels per frame.
Would animated WebP be better?
Often, yes. The Video to WebP tool gives smaller files with more colours, and modern browsers display it, but some chat apps and older software still only accept GIF.
Where is my video processed?
Inside this page. The palette and frames are generated by FFmpeg running locally, and nothing is uploaded.