How to Convert a GIF to MP4 (and Actually Shrink Your File)

GIFs are one of the most inefficient ways to distribute short video clips that exist. A 10-second clip can clock in at 15MB as a GIF and under 1MB as an MP4. If your website is loading slowly, your Slack upload keeps failing, or your social post is spinning while everyone else's loads instantly, the format is almost certainly the problem.

When You'd Actually Need This

Web developers run into this constantly. GIFs on product pages, documentation sites, and marketing landing pages kill Lighthouse scores. Google's Core Web Vitals flag large animated images as LCP and bandwidth problems, and a single unoptimized GIF can wipe out everything else you've done to improve page performance. Replacing a folder of GIFs with MP4 equivalents is one of the faster wins you can make on a slow site.

Social media is another common case. Twitter, Instagram, Discord, and Slack all have file size caps. Discord's free tier limits uploads to 8MB, and Slack's default limit is 1GB per file but your workspace admin may have set it lower. That 12MB reaction GIF you're trying to paste into a thread might work fine at 600KB as an MP4.

Storage is the third case most people don't think about until it's already a problem. A folder of screen-recorded GIFs from a year of documenting UI bugs or team workflows adds up fast. Converting them to MP4 gives you the same visual content at a fraction of the space.

How to Do It

1. Go to quickbrew.tools/tools/gif-to-mp4/.
2. Drop your GIF onto the upload zone or click it to pick a file.
3. Wait for the conversion. FFmpeg runs entirely in your browser, so processing time depends on your machine, not a server queue.
4. Click the download button to save your MP4.

That's it. No account, no watermark, no file sent anywhere.

What's Actually Happening Under the Hood

GIFs store animation as a series of complete or partial frames, each compressed individually using LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression. Every frame gets its own palette, but that palette is limited to 256 colors. For photographic content or anything with gradients, the encoder has to dither colors together to fake depth it can't actually represent.

On top of that, GIF has no inter-frame compression. It can't look at frame 12 and say "most of this is the same as frame 11, I'll just encode the difference." Every frame is mostly independent. For a 10-second clip at 24fps, that's 240 largely self-contained image frames bundled into a single file.

MP4 with H.264 encoding works completely differently. The codec uses inter-frame prediction: it identifies regions that haven't changed between frames and encodes only the deltas. A 10-second clip might have only a handful of keyframes and hundreds of lightweight delta frames. That alone accounts for a majority of the file size reduction.

H.264 also operates in full 24-bit color space, which gives it 16.7 million colors compared to GIF's 256. The output quality is genuinely better, not just smaller.

Format Comparison

Property	GIF	MP4 (H.264)
Format type	Image sequence	Video container
Typical file size	10x baseline	1x baseline
Color depth	256 colors (8-bit palette)	16.7 million (24-bit)
Inter-frame compression	None	Yes (P-frames, B-frames)
Audio support	No	Yes
Browser support	All browsers	All modern browsers
Loop behavior	Native, automatic	Requires loop attribute in HTML
Best use case	Simple icons, pixel art	Everything else

A Note on Privacy

GIFs that capture screen recordings often contain more than you'd expect: visible URLs, internal app interfaces, notification banners, usernames, file paths. If you're converting something that was recorded for internal documentation or bug reporting, it's worth knowing that this tool processes your file entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server at any point.