GIF to MP4 Converter

How to convert a GIF to MP4

1. Drop a GIF into the box above, or click it to choose a file.
2. Check the preview and the frame count, length and loop setting read from the file.
3. Pick a fill colour for transparent areas. White is the default.
4. Choose how many times the animation plays inside the MP4.
5. Press Convert to MP4, play the result, then download it.

Behind the button, the GIF is decoded one frame at a time, so a long animation never has to fit in memory all at once. Each frame is laid onto your fill colour and handed to the browser's own H.264 encoder through the WebCodecs API. The MP4 is written with its index at the front, so it starts playing before it has fully loaded.

The converter takes GIFs up to 100.00 MB with frames up to 1920 × 1080 pixels, and it writes up to 10 minutes of video. Some upload-based converters accept larger files. These ceilings exist because every byte is processed inside your browser tab rather than on a server, which is also why nothing you convert here is ever stored anywhere.

Why the MP4 is usually much smaller

A GIF stores every frame as its own picture of up to 256 colours, squeezed with LZW compression. Its only way to reuse the previous frame is to leave unchanged pixels transparent, which helps a still screen and does little for motion. H.264 predicts most frames from the ones before and keeps full colour, so a background that sits still costs almost nothing after the first frame.

How much you save depends on the animation and on the browser. We ran three test GIFs through this page's engine on 30 September 2026, in Chrome 154 and in WebKit 26.6, the engine behind Safari 26. The GIFs are synthetic, made with ffmpeg test patterns and our own test-fixture script, so treat them as stand-ins for your footage. Chrome gave the same bytes on repeat runs, while WebKit's sizes varied a little from run to run.

Two things stand out. Smooth, slow motion shrinks dramatically, while grain barely shrinks in Chrome. The same GIF also comes out at different sizes in different browsers, because each browser brings its own H.264 encoder with its own trade-offs. That is why the result panel reports the before-and-after size of your file instead of promising a percentage.

If you need the MP4 to hit a particular bitrate for an ad slot or a platform cap, the video bitrate calculator converts between file size, length and bitrate before you export.

Loops, timing and transparency after conversion

Three things behave differently once a GIF becomes a video file. None of them is a bug, but each one surprises people the first time.

Looping

A GIF can carry an instruction to loop forever inside the file. MP4 has no such flag: the player decides. On a web page, a video with the autoplay, loop, muted and playsinline attributes behaves like a GIF. In a chat app or an editor you don't control, the repeat setting writes the animation into the file several times instead, and the file grows with each repeat.

Frame timing

Every GIF frame becomes one video frame with the same on-screen duration, so uneven timing survives. A GIF that holds its first frame for half a second and then races through the rest plays the same way as an MP4. In our tests, a GIF whose frames were stored at 30, 70, 200 and 500 milliseconds came back from the MP4 with exactly those durations.

One detail follows browsers rather than the file. A frame stored with a delay of 0 or 10 milliseconds is shown for 100 milliseconds by web browsers, so the MP4 uses 100 milliseconds too. The result matches what you saw when the GIF played in your browser.

Transparent areas

H.264 video has no alpha channel, so transparency cannot survive the trip to MP4. The converter fills transparent pixels with the colour you choose. It also uses that colour for the single row or column it adds when a GIF has an odd width or height, because H.264 needs even dimensions.

Match the fill to the page or slide the video will sit on and nobody will see the seam. A green-screen fill gives an editor a clean colour to key out later. A transparent video is not something this tool offers.

Where MP4 beats GIF (and where it doesn't)

Use the MP4 anywhere that plays video: social posts, product pages, help centres and slide decks, where it loads faster and looks better than the GIF it came from. The social video spec sheet lists the sizes, lengths and aspect ratios each platform expects.

Keep the GIF where video doesn't play. Many email clients show a GIF in the message body but not a video. Custom chat emoji have to be images, usually GIFs, and plenty of README and documentation hosts embed images but not video. If a GIF is too heavy for one of those places, the GIF file size reducer's advice for when nothing fits covers the options before you give up on the format.

Going the other way, from a video clip to a GIF, is a different job with different trade-offs. The video to GIF converter trims the clip and sets the frame rate before it encodes.

Two neighbours cover what a silent MP4 does not. The GIF to QuickTime converter writes the same H.264 video into a .mov for Keynote, iMovie and Final Cut, and adding sound to a GIF gives you an MP4 with an audio track under the animation.

GIF to MP4 FAQ

How do I convert a GIF to MP4?

Drop the GIF into the converter at the top of this page, pick a fill colour for any transparent areas, choose how many times the animation should play, and press Convert to MP4. The file is encoded in your browser tab, then you can preview it and download it. Nothing is uploaded, so it also works on files you would not paste into a website.

Will the MP4 loop like the GIF?

Not on its own. A GIF carries a loop instruction inside the file, but an MP4 plays once and stops unless the player is told to loop, which web pages do with the video element's loop attribute. If the MP4 has to loop somewhere you don't control, set the repeat option so the animation is written into the file several times.

Does the MP4 have sound?

No. The MP4 is silent because a GIF has no audio track to carry over. The converter writes a video track only, and says so on the result. If you want sound under the animation, pair the MP4 with an audio file in a video editor.

What happens to the transparent parts of my GIF?

They are filled with a colour you choose, white by default. H.264 video has no alpha channel, so an MP4 cannot keep transparency the way a GIF does. Pick the colour of the page or slide the video will sit on, or a green-screen colour if you plan to key it out in an editor later.

Why can't my browser convert the GIF?

The converter needs a video encoder in the browser, and it checks for one when the page loads. If there is no H.264 encoder it falls back to WebM, and if there is no WebCodecs encoder at all it records the GIF in real time with approximate timing. The page tells you which path it is using, and a current desktop browser runs the full H.264 path.