Upload animated GIF to YouTube via FFmpeg

December 31, 2017

Losslessly convert animated GIF to AVI for high-quality YouTube upload:

ffmpeg -i my.gif -c:v huffyuv my.avi

Working

Currently, lossless HuffYUV works for YouTube uploads. HuffYUV is a primitive lossless compression algorithm, but you don’t want YouTube to doubly-lossy encode a lossy input video.

NOT working

ProRes: Video codec isn’t recognized by YouTube
FFV1: Video is often heavily clipped horizontally, half the video panel is missing