Convert AVI to GIF
Turn a clip from an old AVI into a looping GIF. This pair works better than most, for an unexpected reason: AVI footage is nearly always standard definition and already heavily compressed, so the limits a GIF imposes — 480 pixels wide, twelve frames a second, 256 colors — take away much less than they would from modern video.
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Add to Chrome — freeDrop your AVI file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- First ten seconds, 12 fps, 480 pixels wide
- Old footage suits GIF's limits unusually well
- Loops forever with no player required
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use AVI to GIF
- 1
Add the AVI
Drop the file in or choose it from your computer. Old AVI files are usually small enough to upload whole.
- 2
Convert
Ten seconds become a looping GIF at 12 frames a second and 480 pixels across.
- 3
Paste it anywhere
Chat, issue trackers, email and documents all show a GIF inline without a player.
The one case where GIF's limits barely bite
Converting modern video to GIF is a series of painful reductions. A 4K clip at 60 frames a second in full color becomes 480 pixels wide, twelve frames a second and 256 colors, and every one of those steps is visible.
Old AVI footage arrives having already paid most of that price. Camcorders and capture cards of the era recorded standard definition — often 640 by 480, which is barely above the GIF width limit here. Frame rates were 25 or 30 rather than 60. And DivX and Xvid, compressing hard for the hard drives and connections of the time, had already flattened a great deal of the subtle color variation that makes a 256-color palette struggle.
The result is that an AVI-to-GIF conversion often looks close to its source, in a way that an MP4-to-GIF conversion of modern footage does not.
How it works
Ten seconds are taken from the start of the clip, the frame rate is reduced to twelve, and the width is set to 480 pixels — with the height following in proportion, so nothing is stretched. The frames are then mapped to a 256-color palette chosen for the clip.
Whatever codec the AVI holds is read directly. There is no need to convert the file to MP4 first, and doing so would only add an encoding step and its cost.
Why the limits exist at all
GIF stores every frame as a complete image. Video codecs store one frame and then describe what changed; GIF cannot, so file size grows directly with length, dimensions and how much movement there is.
Without a cap, a minute of video would produce a file larger than the video itself. Ten seconds at 480 pixels keeps the result something you can actually paste into a message.
What GIF is for
It is not a better video format and it is not trying to be. It is an image, and software that will not embed a video will still display an image and animate it — email clients, older wikis, some issue trackers, a great deal of internal tooling.
That is the whole reason to make one. Where the destination handles video, send the video: it will be smaller, smoother and in full color.
Examples
A moment from old camcorder footage
Standard-definition footage is often already close to 480 pixels wide, so the size limit removes little and the result looks much like the source.
A clip from a downloaded video of the era
Files from the DivX years were compressed hard for the storage of the time. Converting one to GIF loses less than converting modern video does.
Frequently asked questions
Why does old footage convert to GIF so well?
Because most of what the conversion takes away has already gone. A GIF here is limited to 480 pixels wide, and a standard-definition AVI is often 640 or 720 across — so the reduction is modest rather than drastic. The frame rate drop to twelve is smaller in proportion than it would be from 60 fps footage, and the DivX or Xvid encoding already smoothed away much of the fine color detail that a 256-color palette struggles with.
Will it look better than the AVI?
No — nothing added by a conversion is real detail. What happens is that the GIF is much closer to the source than it would be from a modern recording, so the usual visible penalty is smaller. The clip will look like what it always looked like, which for footage of this age is the most anyone can ask.
Do I need to convert the AVI to MP4 first?
No. The AVI is read directly here, whatever codec is inside it. Converting to MP4 first would add an encoding step, and every encoding step costs something. Go straight to GIF if a GIF is what you want.
Why is there no sound?
GIF has never had audio. It was specified in 1987 as an image format, animation was added as an extension, and sound was never part of the specification at any point. If the clip needs its soundtrack, a short MP4 is the answer, or the audio can be extracted separately as an MP3.