3 tools to compress video, convert audio and make GIFs

A five-second screen capture at 480p, saved as an animated GIF: 8.4 MB. The same clip as an MP4: 211 KB. Forty times smaller — and the MP4 has more colours in it.

That is not a tuning difference. It is a format designed in 1987 for still pictures being asked to do a job it was never built for.

GIF stores every frame as a complete image, compressed on its own, from a palette of at most 256 colours. Nothing is shared between frames — if 95% of the pixels did not move, GIF stores them again anyway, twenty-four times a second. H.264 does the opposite: one full frame, then only the differences from it, in full colour.

The usual gap is ten to twenty times. Screen recordings, where most of the frame sits still, reach the top of that range and past it.

So when should you still make a GIF?

When the destination will not take a video — and that is still a real list. Plenty of email clients, some chat and forum software, documentation and wiki platforms that accept an image but not a <video> element, and anywhere something has to autoplay, loop silently and need no controls or JavaScript at all.

That is the honest case for GIF: compatibility, not quality and certainly not size. When you are in it, the job is to make the GIF as good as a 256-colour format allows, and that is won or lost on the palette. A GIF quantised to a generic web-safe palette bands badly on gradients and skin tones, which is why so many of them look worse than the video they came from. Video to GIF builds the palette from your own footage, so the 256 colours it keeps are the 256 your clip actually uses.

Then keep it short, crop it tight, and drop the frame rate. Twelve to fifteen frames a second is usually indistinguishable in a UI recording and roughly halves the file.

Compressing video: resolution before quality

The slider everyone reaches for is quality or bitrate. The lever that actually moves the number is resolution, because halving both dimensions quarters the pixel count before any codec gets involved. A 1080p clip playing in a 700-pixel column is carrying about three times the pixels it will ever display.

So the order is: resolution down to what will actually be shown, then trim off the dead seconds at either end, then quality — and only then start nudging.

Video Compressor is the free one, and does all three: a target quality, a target resolution and a trim, with an MP4 out the other side.

Audio: choose by where it is going

The split that matters is lossless against lossy. Lossless keeps every sample and is what you want for a master you will edit again; lossy throws away detail you were unlikely to hear and is what you want for anything that has to be delivered.

Within lossy, the choice is mostly about compatibility versus efficiency. MP3 opens on absolutely anything and is the safe default when you do not know the destination. AAC does better at the same bitrate. Opus does better again at low bitrates and is the sensible pick for speech and for the web, as long as whatever plays it is modern.

One rule worth holding onto: every lossy-to-lossy conversion loses a little more. MP3 to AAC is not a free upgrade — it is a second generation of loss on top of the first. Go back to the original whenever you still have it.

Audio Converter handles MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, Ogg and Opus in either direction, and will also lift the audio track straight out of a video.

All three run in the tab

These are the heaviest files any of these tools touch, and none of them are uploaded. The three media tools run ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, in the page, so a 200 MB video is read off your disk and processed on your own machine.

That is a genuine trade rather than a free win. You get no upload wait and no copy of your footage on someone else's server — and in exchange your laptop does the encoding, which is slower than a server would be and will spin the fan up. For most clips that is the better end of the deal; for an hour of 4K it is not, and it is worth knowing which one you are holding before you start.

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