Turns a WebM into an animated GIF. WebM is what browser screen recorders and many web tools produce, and its codecs are the ones browsers decode best.
The codec is never a problem here
What GIF costs you
256 colours per frame. Video is millions. Gradients, skies and skin tones band visibly, and nothing can prevent it — the palette is part of the format. Dithering trades that banding for noise, which sometimes looks better and always makes the file larger.
No real interframe compression. Modern video stores what changed between frames; GIF essentially stores each frame. That is why a ten-second clip becomes tens of megabytes while the source MP4 was two.
No audio. GIF has never had any and never will.
The upside is that a GIF plays inline everywhere without a play button — in an email, a README, a chat, a forum post. That is the entire reason the format survives, and it is a good one.
Keeping the file usable
Width. Halving it quarters the pixel count and roughly quarters the file. 480 pixels is plenty for most purposes and 320 is fine for chat.
Length. Every second at 12 fps is twelve more full pictures. Trim to the part that matters — the trim controls are on this page, so no separate editing step is needed.
Frame rate. 10–15 fps reads as smooth for most footage. Below 8 it starts to stutter; above 20 you are paying a lot for very little.
The practical limits worth knowing: Slack stops animating GIFs above about 2 MB, most forums cap around 5, GitHub allows 10, and Discord's free tier 10. A conversion above 15 MB is flagged in the notes.
Other names for this
Also searched as “convert webm to gif”.
Questions
- Which WebM codecs work?
- VP8, VP9 and AV1 — all of them. WebM only permits royalty-free codecs and browsers decode every one.
- Should I use a GIF or keep the WebM?
- Keep the WebM wherever it will play. It is a fraction of the size at better quality; GIF is for places that only accept images.
- Is my video uploaded?
- No. The decoding and the GIF encoding both happen in this tab. Video files are large, which is exactly why upload-based converters queue and cap them — none of that applies here because nothing is sent anywhere.