Converting MP4 to GIF produces a looping animated image suitable for embedding in web pages, messaging apps, and documentation where video playback is not supported. MP4 stores full-colour video with millions of colours using H.264 compression; GIF is limited to a 256-colour palette per frame and uses LZW lossless compression on indexed pixels. The conversion selects a representative palette for each frame (or an adaptive global palette) to minimise colour banding, then encodes the frames at a target frame rate (typically 10-15 fps to control file size). GIF files are substantially larger than MP4 at equivalent visual quality, so short clips under 10 seconds are most practical. Audio is discarded since GIF has no audio channel. 1converter uses FFmpeg with the palettegen and paletteuse filters to optimise colour fidelity, then passes the frames to the GIF encoder for final output.