Animated GIFs are everywhere, but the format is old and wasteful. A few seconds of animation can weigh several megabytes, colours are limited to 256 per frame, and a growing number of places want video instead: many social networks reject GIF uploads, presentation software handles video better, and web performance tools flag large GIFs as a problem.
This converter turns animated GIF and APNG files into MP4 or WebM. The video looks at least as good as the GIF, since a GIF's colours fit easily into a modern codec, and is usually far smaller. Add files, choose a format and how many times the animation should play, and press Convert. Your files are converted locally and never uploaded.
Why a video is so much smaller than a GIF
GIF compresses each frame on its own with LZW, the same simple method used in 1980s file archivers, and stores up to 256 colours per frame. It has no real notion of motion, so a small change between frames still costs a lot of bytes. H.264, used in MP4, and VP8, used in WebM, encode only what changes from one frame to the next and predict motion, which is exactly what animations are made of. The same animation commonly shrinks to a small fraction of its GIF size.
There are two behaviours to know about. A GIF loops forever by itself, while a video file plays once unless the player or page is set to loop it, which social apps and the HTML video loop attribute usually do. And video formats have no transparency in this tool, so transparent areas of a GIF or APNG become black.
When to convert a GIF to video
Posting animations where GIFs are not accepted
Platforms that only take photos and videos accept an MP4 of the same animation. Use Times to play the animation to make a short loop last long enough to be noticed.
Faster web pages
Replacing a large GIF with a muted, looping MP4 or WebM in an HTML video element is a standard performance fix that often saves most of the bytes.
Slides and video editors
PowerPoint, Keynote and editing software handle video more reliably than GIFs, with smoother playback and proper timeline control.
Options and output
Output format offers MP4 (H.264, the default) and WebM (VP8). MP4 plays practically everywhere, including on iPhones, in PowerPoint and in every social app; WebM is an open format well suited to web pages. Times to play the animation, from 1 to 10, repeats the animation inside the video, so a two-second GIF set to 5 becomes a ten-second video. The result has no sound track, since a GIF has none.
H.264 and VP8 need even pixel dimensions, so an odd width or height is rounded down by one pixel, and the picture is stored with standard 4:2:0 colour, which plays on every device. Conversion is done by the site's WebAssembly build of ffmpeg, which is about 31 MB and downloads the first time you use any video or audio tool here. Each file can be up to 100 MB, and several can be converted in one go.
So verwenden Sie dieses Tool
- Drop one or more GIF or APNG files on the box above, or click it to browse. Animated PNGs with a .png name are accepted too.
- Choose MP4 or WebM under Output format.
- Set Times to play the animation if the video should repeat the loop.
- Press Convert and download each video, or all of them with Download all (.zip).
Limitations
- Transparency is not kept: transparent pixels turn black.
- The video does not loop forever by itself the way a GIF does. Repeat it with Times to play the animation, or set the player or page to loop.
- Files larger than 100 MB are not accepted.
- The tool is meant for animated images; a still PNG gives a video that shows a single picture.