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GIF to MP4
GIF files are huge. MP4 of the same animation is tiny.
Animated GIF only
Why replace GIF with MP4?
GIF was designed in 1987 and uses a palette of 256 colours with a lossless compression algorithm that is very inefficient for photographic animation. A modern MP4 with H.264 encoding carries the same frames at 5 to 15 times smaller file size, with full colour depth. Every major browser and social platform now supports MP4 autoplay.
Social media and autoplay
Twitter, Reddit, Discord and most other platforms automatically convert GIFs to MP4 on upload. Uploading MP4 directly gives you control over quality and skips their often lossy automatic conversion.
Frequently asked questions
How much smaller will the MP4 be?
Typically 5–15× smaller. A 5 MB GIF usually becomes a 400–800 KB MP4 at the same visual quality.
Will it loop like the original GIF?
The MP4 file itself does not loop — looping is controlled by the player or the web page. On websites you add loop autoplay muted attributes to the video tag.
The GIF has transparent areas.
MP4 does not support transparency. Transparent pixels are filled with black in the output. If transparency is essential, keep the GIF or use WebM with an alpha channel.
The animation looks jerky.
GIF frames often have variable timing that the browser player may not replicate exactly. The visual result matches the GIF playback you see in the preview.