Convert GIFs to MP4s on a Mac

July 11, 2023 2:29 PM

I have a bunch of old GIFs that I would like to turn into videos, preferably MP4 format. I am using a Macintosh. This should be easy, right? No options, just drop in the GIF and out comes the MP4. But when I search for "GIF to Video" all I get is software that converts videos to GIFs, which is the opposite of what I want.
posted by Winnie the Proust to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: HandBrake should be able to do this pretty easily.

Under the hood, HandBrake uses FFmpeg which is like a "Swiss army knife" for digital audio and video. FFmpeg itself can convert GIF to MP4 just fine, so HandBrake can probably do it too.
posted by teraflop at 2:50 PM on July 11, 2023

Gifsicle will make an animated GIF; not an MP4 strictly speaking, but may suit the same functional purpose unless you genuinely need a file with (blank) audio and video streams.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:09 PM on July 11, 2023

Response by poster: Teraflop, that works! I had actually tried HandBrake previously, and for some reason it did not work. But I just tried again and I was able to make the conversion. 22 MB GIF replaced with a 900K MP4 with no loss of quality. Thank you!
posted by Winnie the Proust at 3:25 PM on July 11, 2023

Response by poster: (They sucked his brains out! - I already have (animated) GIFs. I want to convert them to MP4 files because the format is much more efficient.)
posted by Winnie the Proust at 3:27 PM on July 11, 2023

Imgur does this automatically when you upload a gif. Drag and drop the lot of em into the upload page and re-download?
posted by rosary at 5:33 PM on July 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: (Winnie the Proust, not that it matters that much, but I think you marked the wrong answer as "best".)
posted by intermod at 7:25 PM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks!
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:38 AM on July 12, 2023

Response by poster: Update: I was able to get handbrake to work for some GIFs, but it wasn't able to process others. It gave a message that no valid data was found. Next I turned to Gif Brewery. This is normally used to create GIFs, but it can also output MP4 files, and you can open GIFs with it. So it does the trick. So far it's worked on everything I've thrown at it.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:42 AM on July 12, 2023