Turn a video into a GIF
A GIF is what survives being pasted somewhere a video will not play: a bug report, a chat message, a README, an email. No player, no controls, no sound, and it starts the moment it appears.
The trade is size and colour. GIF holds 256 colours per frame and compresses like it is 1987, so the presets here control frame rate and width — the two dials that actually decide how big the result is.
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Worth knowing
- Keep it short
- GIF has no inter-frame compression worth the name. Ten seconds at 12 frames a second is 120 full images; the same clip as MP4 would be a fraction of the size. If the destination accepts video, send video.
- The presets are frame rate and width
- Smallest is 10 fps at 360px wide, Balanced 12 fps at 480px, Best 15 fps at 640px. Quality settings in the usual sense do not apply — a GIF's size is decided by how many frames there are and how wide they are.
- The audio is dropped, because GIF has none
- There is no soundtrack in the format. If the audio matters, extract it separately or keep the video.
- This one needs the full engine
- Building a GIF means generating an optimal 256-colour palette from the clip and then applying it, which is a filter graph rather than a codec. That is ffmpeg's job, so this pair downloads a 9.7 MB engine the first time — once, then cached, and the page says so before it starts.