

See the cropping examples in the ffmpeg docs for more.Īdditional option: -b:v bitrate With this you can control the quality of the video. This math operation: iw/2*2, makes sure that the video’s dimensions are divisible by 2, because an MP4 video using H.264 just needs that. vf filtergraph This defines a filter (an alias for -filter:v) which in this case is using a crop filter: "crop=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2", in which the iw stands for "input width" and ih stands for "input height". We include this option to specify a specific format which has maximum compatibility across all browsers. pix_fmt Pixel format MP4 videos store pixels in different formats. movflags This option optimizes the structure of the MP4 file so the browser can load it as quickly as possible. Here’s what’s happening line-by-line: -i input This flag simply sets the script input, test-gif.gif in this case. You might know this error if you’ve ever installed ffmpeg:
#FFMPEG GIF TO MP4 CONVERT INSTALL#
Install ffmpegįfmpeg is bolted pretty deeply into the system, on Mac it needs the Command Line tools to function. The above mentioned HandBrake uses ffmpeg under the hood. There’s a great command line tool: ffmpeg that’ll convert pretty much anything to any format. This random 24MB gif turned into a 1MB mp4.ĭownload HandBrake at. You can also drill into the nitty gritty of the setting if you want more control. It’s open source, has solid defaults, and is easy to use. HandBrake provides a nice graphical user interface for compressing, converting, and resizing videos. The main format behind it is WebM and mp4 as fallback. Imgur for example has their own little gifv thingy, that in reality is just a muted video, which auto-plays and loops. Here’s an SO thread if you want to dig more into it. If I understand right, for instance, Linux distributions do not support mp4 out the box, because of the fees. What that means is: although you can freely upload mp4 videos to internet without worrying about royalties, but the companies implementing mp4 to their products need to pay a royalty fee. But, it’s not open source nor royalty free. Unsurprisingly mp4 is the most supported one. Here’s the video formats commonly in use in the web and the browser support: Video format browser support If we’d like to use a video instead of a gifs, the video replacement should more-or-less fill this criteria. "Old tech" does not necessarily equal bad, we still use hammers for example. Videos can act like gifs and have a much effective compression algorithm, videos also don’t need to be fully loaded to start the playback. But gifs were never meant to handle anything else than simple graphics. Gif is an extremely inefficient way to pack video, where as the static gif image is pretty good format for showing graphical shapes with few colors. The technology behind animated gifs is old and clunky, a remnant of the 90s clipart and guestbooks internet.
#FFMPEG GIF TO MP4 CONVERT WINDOWS#
Technologically speaking gifs are in the same club with Macintosh II, Windows 1, and floppy disc. Graphics Interchange Format, invented in the late 80s, still persisting in our daily lives. For example, scale=iw/3:ih/3 will result in an image with one third the original dimensions.I originally wrote this post in 2015, but I’ve now (2020) rewritten it. You can scale this down even further by changing the value. This will halve the image dimensions, and roughly quarter the file size.00:00:05.5)Ī third option would be to scale down the dimensions of the image: ffmpeg -i input.gif -vf "scale=iw/2:ih/2" output.gif You can add a decimal point to indicate milliseconds.You can also use -t to specify duration instead of end time.

Here is an example: ffmpeg -i input.gif -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:00:03 -c copy output.gif To do this, you will need to define start and end times in ffmpeg. gif, you can shorten the animation to reduce the size.

Replace input.gif with the source filename and output.mp4 with the desired name for the new file. Use the following command: ffmpeg -i input.gif -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4 In many cases it can reduce the file size of a. mp4: This will reduce the file size by an enormous degree without significant loss of quality. If you are flexible with the format, the best option is to convert the file to. gif is an extremely inefficient format for video files.
