WebM to GIF
Screen recordings come out as WebM. This turns them into something you can paste anywhere.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Screen recordings especially
Browser screen recorders save WebM, and most places you want to paste a short demo will not accept it. GIF is the lowest common denominator that still animates.
Screen content is the best case for GIF: flat colors, few gradients, and long stretches where most of the frame does not change. A UI demo at 12 fps and 640 px often comes out surprisingly small.
Why screen recordings suit GIF so well
Two things make interface footage the friendly case. First, GIF's 256-color limit is barely a limit when the source is flat UI: a form, a terminal, a code editor and a dashboard between them use a few dozen distinct colors, so the palette has room to spare and there is no banding because there were no gradients to band. Second, GIF stores a frame as the difference from the one before it where it can, and in a screen recording most of the frame is identical from one moment to the next. A cursor moving across a static page costs almost nothing.
Camera footage is the opposite on both counts, which is why the same settings that give you a tidy 800 KB UI demo will give you a 12 MB mess from a phone clip.
Settings for an interface demo
- 10 to 12 fps is enough. Cursor movement and panel transitions read fine, and you are halving the frame count against a video-like 24.
- 640 px wide keeps UI text legible in a README or a pull request. Below about 480 px, small type becomes unreadable and the GIF stops making its point.
- Trim tightly. Set the start and end here rather than recording precisely. Nobody needs the three seconds where you found the right window.
- Turn dithering off if the recording is entirely flat UI. There are no gradients to smooth, and disabling it removes the faint speckling and shrinks the file.
The readability trap
The most common failure with a UI GIF is not size, it is that the text in it cannot be read. This happens because people scale a 1440p recording down to 480 px and the 12 px type in the interface becomes three pixels tall. If the point of the recording is something small on screen, crop to that region with crop video before converting rather than shrinking the whole desktop. A tight crop at full size is smaller and clearer than a full screen scaled down.
And if the destination accepts video, use it. GitHub, most chat platforms and every modern forum will take an MP4, which will be a fraction of the size at better quality. WebM to MP4 is the one-step conversion for that.
Common questions
What frame rate for a screen recording?
10 to 12 fps is usually enough for interface demos and keeps the file small. Raise it only if you are capturing something that moves smoothly.
Should I use MP4 instead?
If the destination accepts video, yes, it will be far smaller. GIF is for the places that do not.