Breathe new life into WMV videos by converting them to animated GIFs. Fast, free, and works on any device.
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MP4, WebM, AVI, MOV, MKV, FLV & more • Up to 500MB
WMV (Windows Media Video) is a Microsoft format that was once the standard for Windows-based video. Today, WMV files are poorly supported outside of Windows — most browsers, phones, and social platforms can't play them. Converting WMV to GIF gives your old videos universal compatibility and makes them easy to share.
Upload your WMV file, trim it to the clip you want, select a quality preset, and convert. Our server-side FFmpeg engine decodes WMV natively, so there's no need to install Windows Media codecs or any other software.
If you have a library of old WMV recordings — presentations, tutorials, screen captures — converting key moments to GIF is a great way to repurpose them. GIFs can be embedded in documentation, blog posts, and emails where video embeds aren't practical.
WMV (Windows Media Video) is a series of video codecs and containers developed by Microsoft. It was widely used in the Windows XP and Vista era for streaming and disc-based video. WMV uses the ASF (Advanced Systems Format) container and VC-1 or WMV9 codecs.
Of the formats this converter accepts, WMV is the least likely to preview. The ASF container has no MIME type in the HTML5 media stack, and no browser ships a decoder for WMV9 or VC-1. This matters because the editor loads your file into an HTML5 video element first, so you can scrub the timeline, set trim points, crop, and paint a mosaic mask before uploading. Our server decodes WMV without any trouble — we verified a WMV9-encoded file through the live upload path — but the preview step happens in your browser, and for WMV it will usually stop there. If you see a load error, the file is not corrupt and the converter has not rejected it. Converting to MP4 in a desktop tool first is the practical fix, and it also gives you a file you can preview, trim, and crop properly here.
WMV spans roughly a decade of Microsoft codecs, and the differences are visible in the result. Files from the WMV7 and WMV8 era, often with .wmv or .asf extensions, were typically encoded at 320x240 or 640x480 for dial-up and early broadband, frequently interlaced, and at bitrates that already discarded a lot of detail. WMV9 and VC-1 files from the later Windows Media era handle 720p and above and hold up much better. This matters because GIF conversion cannot add detail that was never recorded. If a 320x240 source looks soft as a GIF, the preset is not the problem — Best Quality will preserve the source faithfully but will not invent resolution. For low-resolution sources the useful move is to keep the output at or near native size rather than scaling up, because upscaling makes the softness more obvious rather than less.
Two artefacts show up often enough in WMV files to be worth naming. Interlaced footage, common in anything captured from TV or a DV camcorder, produces horizontal comb-like lines along moving edges; GIF has no concept of fields, so those lines are baked into the exported frames and cannot be corrected afterwards. Deinterlace before uploading if you see it. Separately, old screen recordings of presentations and tutorials are usually the best WMV material for GIF, because interface content is mostly flat colour that survives the 256-colour palette well. For those, crop to the region you are demonstrating and use Higher Quality so text stays legible — legibility matters far more than smooth motion for this kind of clip.
Yes. The conversion happens on our server, so it works on any operating system with a web browser — Mac, Linux, Windows, ChromeOS, or mobile.
No. DRM-protected WMV files cannot be converted. Only unprotected WMV files are supported.
Usually because of the source rather than the conversion. Many WMV files were encoded at 320x240 or 640x480 for dial-up and early broadband, and conversion cannot add detail that was never recorded. Best Quality preserves the source faithfully but will not invent resolution. For a low-resolution source, keep the output at or near its native size — upscaling makes the softness more obvious, not less.
That is expected. No browser ships a decoder for WMV9 or VC-1, and ASF is not a supported container, so the preview step cannot render it. Our server converts WMV fine, but the editor needs a preview to let you trim and crop. Convert to MP4 in a desktop tool first and you will get both a working preview and the same final result.
Yes. No watermark, no signup, and no fee for any feature. The documented limits are 500MB per file and a two-minute processing ceiling.
Most clips finish in 10 to 30 seconds, and processing is capped at two minutes. Upload is usually the slowest part rather than conversion itself, so trimming to the segment you need before uploading saves the most time.