How do I convert an animated GIF to a YouTube friendly video format?

Posted by Dave Webb on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Dave Webb
Published on 2009-07-16T15:45:44Z Indexed on 2010/04/06 11:23 UTC
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My son has made some animations with Pivot Stickfigure Animator which we'd like to upload to YouTube. The problem is Pivot saves as animated GIFs which I can't upload to YouTube.

The Wikipedia article recommends using Windows Movie Maker to convert GIF to WMV, but unfortunatley I'm using Window 7 for which you can get the new Windows Live Movie Maker which doesn't seem to support GIFs.

I Googled and found an article which said to use Beneton Movie GIF to convert animated GIF to AVI, but this seemed to rely on a 3rd Party application which wasn't installed and so failed. Installing the missing application - pjBmp2Avi - by hand and adding it to the path still didn't allow Beneton to do the conversion.

I hoped FFmpeg might do the trick but this only outputs to animated GIFs, it won't read from then.

Further Googling found lots of applications with 30 day trials and so on but I was hoping for something free.

So any suggestions on how I can convert an animated GIF to a movie file on Windows using free (as in beer) software?

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