About 2GIF

What this is

2gif.video does one thing: it turns part of a video into a GIF. Compressing video lives on our sister site FreeCompress, and the small jobs around video — trimming, removing sound, pulling out the audio, rotating, saving a frame — are on is.tools; both are linked from the footer. Keeping one tool on one domain means every improvement lands in one place.

Everything runs inside your browser. When you drop a video in, it is read from your disk and decoded by your own device, using the same hardware decoder that plays it; the frames are quantised, dithered and written into a GIF by code running on your machine, and the file is offered for download. The library that reads the video container is mediabunny; the GIF writer is gifenc, with our own palette, dithering and frame-difference stages on top. There is no upload, no queue, no account and no size limit, because there is no server doing the work that could need any of those.

Why it is built as an editor

Most video-to-GIF sites are a form: two boxes for a start and an end time, a Convert button, a download. That shape dates from a time when the browser could not decode video itself, so the server had to do everything and the page could only collect numbers. Browsers can decode video now. So this page shows a film strip, lets you drag two handles, loops the selection in the preview, and measures the size of the GIF before you press anything. The difference is not cosmetic: choosing the right two seconds is the whole job, and doing it by typing timestamps means three or four round trips through convert-and-check.

The other thing a server-side converter cannot do is honour your device. A phone video that plays upright can come out sideways from tools that read the frames without reading the rotation flag stored next to them. Here the flag is applied before the first frame is taken.

What you can expect

2GIF is built the way desktop software used to be built: one thing, done properly, kept working for years. There is no support desk, but every message sent through the contact page is read, and what breaks gets fixed. The changelog records what changed and when.

The converter is free and unlimited; the site is supported by the ads on the page. We do not sell anything, collect e-mail addresses, or run affiliate links. The privacy policy says exactly what is measured and by whom.

Known issues

Decoding depends on the browser. Chrome and Edge decode the most formats; Safari 17+ works on Mac and iPhone; Firefox may not decode HEVC. AVI, WMV, FLV and other legacy containers are not supported — convert them to MP4 first. GIF itself is an old format: 256 colours per frame, no partial transparency, and files grow linearly with length, which is why the selection is capped at 60 seconds and the page suggests a small MP4 for anything long.