A GIF is still the most portable kind of moving picture. It autoplays in chat apps, issue trackers, wikis and README files, needs no play button and loops forever, which suits reactions, demos and bug reproductions a screenshot cannot explain.
Load a video, drag the selection to the moment you want, choose a frame rate and a width, and press Create GIF. The tool builds a palette tuned to your clip, renders the animation in your browser and shows the result with its pixel dimensions and file size before you download it.
Why GIFs need careful settings
GIF is a format from 1987. Each frame can use at most 256 colours and the compression is lossless but simple, so a GIF of a video is usually many times larger than the video it came from. A few seconds at a modest size often lands at one to several megabytes, while the same seconds as MP4 might weigh a few hundred kilobytes.
Three settings decide the weight. Width matters most, because pixel count grows with the square of it: going from 480 to 640 pixels wide adds roughly 78 percent more pixels per frame. Frame rate multiplies the number of frames, so 20 fps produces about twice the data of 10 fps. Length multiplies both, which is why the tool caps a GIF at 30 seconds and starts you with the first five.
What people make GIFs for
Showing a feature or a bug
A three-second loop of a menu opening or an error appearing explains more in a ticket or a pull request than a paragraph of text. Screen recordings convert especially well because they contain large flat areas of colour.
Reactions and memes for chat
Slack, Discord, Teams and most messengers play GIFs inline without a click. A short moment cut from your own footage at 320 pixels wide and 10 to 15 fps keeps the file light enough to send quickly.
Animations where video is not allowed
Many documentation platforms, forums and email clients accept images but not video files. A GIF slips through anywhere an image upload is accepted and plays in nearly every email client, although some only show the first frame.
Palette, dithering and the options
The conversion uses ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, which downloads once (about 31 MB) the first time you use a video or audio tool here and is then kept by your browser. In a first pass it samples your selection at the chosen frame rate, scales it with the Lanczos filter, and generates a custom 256-colour palette weighted towards the parts of the picture that move. A second pass then maps each frame onto that palette with ordered Bayer dithering, which hides banding in gradients without the shimmering noise of random dithering, and only the region that changes between frames is re-dithered, which keeps static backgrounds from flickering and the file lighter. The finished GIF loops forever.
Frame rate offers 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 fps, with 10 as the default: smooth enough for most screen recordings and light on size. Use 15 to 25 for fast motion such as sport or gaming. Width offers 240, 320, 480, 640 pixels or Original (up to 1280 pixels), with 480 as the default; the height follows the video's proportions, and the tool never makes a GIF wider than its source. When a long selection at a high frame rate would hold more frames than a browser tab can handle, the tool narrows the GIF to fit and tells you the width before you start. Everything runs on one processor thread, so longer selections at full width can take a while, particularly on phones.
طريقة الاستخدام
- Drop an MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV or AVI file on the box above, or click Choose a file.
- Move the selection handles or type Start and End times. The selection can be up to 30 seconds long; press Play selection to preview it.
- Choose a Frame rate and a Width. Lower values give a smaller file.
- Press Create GIF, check the animation and its size, then press Download GIF. Change settings and try again if it is too heavy.
Limitations
- A GIF has no sound. If you need audio, use Trim Video to cut a short MP4 instead.
- The 256-colour limit can show banding or dotted texture in skies, skin tones and soft gradients.
- The selection is capped at 30 seconds.
- Source files must be 500 MB or smaller. Original width stops at 1280 pixels, and long, fast selections are made narrower so they fit in memory; they can still be slow on mobile devices.