Video to GIF Converter

Media Client-side gif video converter animation ping-pong loop mp4-to-gif screen-recording

This tool runs entirely client-side, in your browser: your data is never sent anywhere.

What it does

Turns a short video clip (MP4, WebM, MOV supported by your browser) into an animated GIF — entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the video is decoded locally, frames are grabbed from a <canvas>, and encoded directly into a GIF file using a pure-JavaScript encoder.

You can also choose how the GIF plays back:

Normal loop — plays forward, then jumps back to the start (classic GIF loop).
Ping-pong (back and forth) — plays forward, then backward, then forward again, forever — no jump cut, seamless "boomerang" effect.
Reverse — plays the clip backward, looping.

Try it

How it works

You pick a local video file — it's loaded into a hidden <video> element and a preview is shown, entirely client-side (URL.createObjectURL).
When you click Convert, the tool seeks the video frame-by-frame (based on your chosen start time, duration, and target FPS), draws each frame onto an off-screen <canvas> (resized to your target width, preserving aspect ratio), and collects the resulting frames as raw pixel data.
Depending on the playback mode:

Normal loop: frames are kept in their captured (forward) order.
Ping-pong: the captured forward frames are followed by the same frames in reverse order (minus the duplicated end frames), so the GIF plays forward then backward with no visible jump.
Reverse: the frame order is simply flipped.

The ordered frame list is fed into a pure-JavaScript GIF encoder (an in-browser implementation of the GIF89a format with a NeuQuant-style color quantizer), which produces a single animated .gif file with infinite looping enabled.
The resulting GIF is shown as a preview and offered as a direct download — the file itself is built with Blob/URL.createObjectURL, so it never touches a server.

Tips

Keep clips short (2–5 seconds) and the frame rate moderate (8–15 fps) — GIFs are uncompressed-ish per frame internally, so file size grows fast with duration, resolution, and frame rate.
Ping-pong roughly doubles the number of encoded frames for the same duration (forward + backward pass), so expect a larger file than "Normal loop" or "Reverse" for the same settings.
Lower the output width first if the resulting GIF is too large — it has the biggest impact on file size.
Browser support depends on the video codec — most modern browsers play H.264 MP4, VP8/VP9 WebM, but some formats (e.g. certain HEVC/MOV files) may not decode; try converting the source video to MP4 first if it fails to load.

Notes

All processing (decoding, frame extraction, GIF encoding) happens locally in your browser tab. Your video is never uploaded anywhere.
Very long videos or high frame counts can use a lot of memory, since every frame is held in memory during encoding. If the tab becomes unresponsive, try a shorter duration, lower FPS, or smaller width.