RunToolRunGIF to MP4
Convert GIF files to MP4 format.
How to Convert GIF to MP4
Select a GIF
Click the upload area or drop the animated GIF you want to convert.
Re-encoding in your browser
Frames are re-encoded as an H.264 MP4 video on your device.
Download the MP4
Save a video that's typically 90%+ smaller than the GIF and plays everywhere.
Almost always a large improvement
GIF stores each frame with a 256-colour palette and compression designed for flat graphics in 1987. MP4 uses a modern codec that describes how frames differ from each other. The same animation as MP4 is routinely a tenth of the size, and looks better because it is not limited to 256 colours.
This is the rare conversion where nearly every metric improves at once: smaller file, more colours, smoother playback, less memory while decoding.
What you give up
GIF plays automatically and loops everywhere, including in contexts that only accept an image — chat clients, email signatures, documentation systems, forum posts. Video needs a player and does not always autoplay.
On the web this is a solved problem: a muted video element with autoplay and loop behaves like a GIF and is what social platforms actually serve when you upload one. Outside the web, the destination decides, and some places still only take GIF.
Colour and banding
A GIF has already been reduced to 256 colours, and converting cannot restore what was discarded. Gradients that became visible bands stay banded, and dithering noise stays as noise — the MP4 faithfully reproduces the GIF it came from.
Where the original video still exists, encoding from that instead produces a dramatically better result than converting the GIF. Converting is for the cases where the GIF is all you have.
Frame timing
GIF stores a delay per frame, so an animation can hold one frame for a second and flick through others in milliseconds. Video runs at a constant frame rate, so variable timing has to be approximated by repeating or dropping frames.
For most animations the difference is invisible. For a GIF that deliberately holds a frame for comic timing, the converted version can feel subtly off, and picking a frame rate that divides evenly into the original delays helps.
Transparency does not survive
GIF supports a single fully transparent colour, and MP4 in its usual form supports none. A GIF with a transparent background converts with that transparency flattened, typically to black or white.
If the transparency is doing real work — an overlay, a sticker, a logo animation — MP4 is the wrong destination and the animation should stay a GIF or become a format that supports an alpha channel.
How it runs
Conversion uses a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg in your browser, so nothing is uploaded. Because GIFs are usually short, this is one of the faster media operations here even single-threaded.
The output is H.264 in an MP4 container, which plays on essentially everything without argument — which is, along with the size, the entire reason to convert.