AVI to GIF Converter

Q: Can I make a GIF from an AVI larger than 95 MB?

Not in one piece. Cut out the part you need first with [trim video](/trim-video), or convert the AVI to MP4, which is usually several times smaller, and make the GIF from that.

AVI files tend to come from somewhere old: a 2000s digital camera, a MiniDV tape capture, a DivX download or a Windows screen recorder. Converting a few seconds of one to GIF gets the moment out of a format many phones and web apps no longer open.

or drop MP4, MOV, MKV … files here ·

Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes

GIF size

Width

Frame rate

Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.

How to use this tool

1
Upload the AVI
Add one .avi file or up to 20, each up to 95 MB. Long tape captures are often bigger than that, so trim or split them first.
2
Mark the clip
Enter Start at and End at in seconds or minutes:seconds. This page starts at 320 px Width and 10 fps, which suits the low resolution of most AVI sources.
3
Convert to GIF
Press Convert to GIF, play the preview and download the result.

Most AVI clips are small by today's standards, often 320 × 240 or 640 × 480, so a GIF at 320 px loses almost no detail and stays light.

Old AVI codecs an AVI to GIF converter has to read

Microsoft introduced AVI in 1992 with Video for Windows. It is a container built on the RIFF file structure, and the video inside can be compressed with almost anything that registered a codec on Windows. That is why two .avi files can behave completely differently: one opens in every player, the other asks for a codec pack that stopped being maintained years ago.

Many compact digital cameras of the 2000s recorded Motion JPEG AVI, a sequence of JPEG images. Camcorders captured over FireWire produced DV AVI. DivX and Xvid files carried MPEG-4 Part 2 video. Here the decoding happens on our side, so you do not need any of those codecs installed. The original AVI format also topped out at 1 to 2 GB per file, depending on the software, until the OpenDML extension, often called AVI 2.0, removed that ceiling, which is why long captures are sometimes split into numbered parts.

Typical AVI frame sizes and the GIF width to pick

4:3

320 × 240 px

Early camera clip

Keep 320 px; going wider only blurs

4:3

640 × 480 px

VGA camera or webcam

320 or 480 px GIF

3:2

720 × 480 px

NTSC DV camcorder

Stored 3:2, shown as 4:3 or 16:9

5:4

720 × 576 px

PAL DV camcorder

25 frames per second, interlaced

Interlaced, oversized and silent AVI files

Comb lines on movement
The AVI is interlaced DV or analog capture. Keep Width at 320 to 360 px so neighboring lines blend, and choose a calmer moment if a fast pan still shows stripes.
Upload refused
The file is over 95 MB. Cut the part you need first, then make the GIF from the short piece.
GIF is mostly black or a frozen frame
Some captures start with seconds of black leader or a still title. Move Start at past it.
Picture looks flickery
Analog tape transfers carry noise that changes every frame. Lower Colors to 128 and keep Floyd–Steinberg Dithering to calm the grain.

AVI

Audio Video Interleave

AVI is a multimedia container introduced by Microsoft in 1992 as part of Video for Windows. It can hold many codecs, from uncompressed video to DivX and Xvid, which made it a common format for camcorders and downloaded films in the 2000s. It lacks modern features such as reliable variable frame rates and standard subtitle support, and files are often large. Desktop players such as VLC play AVI, but phones and browsers usually cannot.

Compression: Lossy or lossless
Transparency: –
Animation: –
Introduced: 1992 · Microsoft

AVI converter

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format

GIF was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and is still the most widely supported format for short, looping animations. It is lossless but limited to a palette of 256 colours per frame, so photos and gradients show banding and dithering. It supports only on/off (1-bit) transparency, which leaves jagged edges on curved shapes. Animated GIFs are often far larger than the same clip as MP4 or WebP. Every browser, chat app and social platform plays GIFs.

Compression: Lossless
Transparency: Yes
Animation: Yes
Introduced: 1987 · CompuServe

GIF converter

AVI is a 1990s Windows container that phones, messaging apps and many browsers will not play; a GIF made from it shows the moment inline anywhere without anyone hunting for a codec.

How big the GIF from an AVI gets

A 320 × 240 frame has 76,800 pixels, and a GIF stores one palette index, one byte, per pixel before compression. At 10 fps a five-second clip is 50 frames, about 3.8 MB of raw indexes, which LZW compression and the skipping of unchanged areas usually bring down to somewhere around 1 MB. Double the width to 640 px and the raw figure is four times as large.

Two cheap savings come from the playback settings. Speed at 2× halves the frame count for the same moment, and Boomerang doubles it, so use the second only when the loop needs to run back and forth. If the GIF is for a page you control, an MP4 from AVI to MP4 is far smaller and keeps the sound.

AVI to GIF questions

Which AVI codecs can be turned into a GIF?

The common ones decode without extra software: MJPEG from digital cameras, DV from camcorders, DivX and Xvid, Cinepak, Intel Indeo and Microsoft Video 1, plus uncompressed video. A file made with a rare capture-card codec may fail; converting it with the software that recorded it is then the only route.

Why are there thin horizontal lines across moving objects in my GIF?

That is interlacing. Camcorder video stores two half-pictures per frame, taken a fraction of a second apart, and moving edges show both as a comb pattern. Shrinking to 320 or 360 px blends most of the lines away; scenes with fast motion still show some.

Can I make a GIF from an AVI larger than 95 MB?

Not in one piece. Cut out the part you need first with trim video, or convert the AVI to MP4, which is usually several times smaller, and make the GIF from that.

What size GIF should I expect from a 320 px AVI clip?

At 320 px, 10 fps and five seconds, a GIF from home video typically lands around 1 MB, give or take depending on how much the camera moves. Grainy low-light footage is the expensive case, because noise changes every pixel in every frame.

Why does this page use Floyd–Steinberg dithering?

Old AVI footage is soft and noisy already, and Floyd–Steinberg spreads palette errors in a fine grain that blends with it. Switch Dithering to Sierra in Advanced settings for cleaner, newer sources.