Download YouTube Videos and Turn Them Into Animated GIFs

What? You don’t know why you’d want to do this? Hey, I don’t know why you’d do it either, but it seems that animated gifs have come a long way since the animated smiley days. Besides we’re going to show you the real EB chasing kids around trying to get their candy, where to find a real, honest-to-goodness YouTube downloader that installs ZERO malware — a rare find indeed.

Then we’re going to show you where to get a free program to turn your favorite YouTube videos into animated gifs – quickly and easily. NO EB! The animated gifs don’t have sound, you should be glad too…nobody wants to hear you say: “Yum, yum, eat ’em up!”.

OK..let’s get started. First you need to download the YouTube downloader – a free, malware-free YouTube downloader. And any of you who have tried to find a clean YouTube downloader already know there aren’t many out there. This YouTube download comes as a zipped file which contains the program executable and the configuration file. There isn’t any malware in the zip file and the program contains none, but the author sure likes to play games with the download. So to make it easy for you, we’ve uploaded the file to our site for you and you can download it from here. Once you’ve downloaded it, unzip it, right-click on the exe file, choose “Pin to Start” or “Pin to tasbar”- or both. Then you can run the program by clicking on the shortcuts you just created — or double-clicking directly on the exe file:

If you can’t figure out how it works by looking at the picture above, just click the Help button — the author has some nice tutorials. I suggest you always choose “Convert FLV to MP4” when you save your YouTube video. And save it to a folder like “Videos”so you can find it

Now if all you want is a YouTube download that is safe and free and won’t infect your computer with a bunch of hijackers and PUPs, you can stop reading. Of course, if you stop reading now, you won’t see EB chasing kids around trying to get their candy… but Hey! EB won’t mind.

OK now that you know how to download YouTube videos, you might want to turn all or part of the video into an animated gif. Now before we go on, we are aware there are like 90 million free “convert video to gif ” sites – and feel free to use them — just remember they’ll try to get you to give up your email address and try to upsell you to the “Pro” versions which are not free. You’ll find most of these kinds of sites have a lot of restrictions on free users…but still it’s your option.

We prefer to use a small program called Free Video to GIF Converter. It’s free (DUH!) and it’s also free of malware and other junkware, so even if your McAfee Site Advisor or heaven forbid, “WOT” , gives you a warning, please be assured of two things:

1. This shows you why we don’t recommend, use, or even vaguely like McAfee or WOT (Virus Total gives the program a 100% clean bill of health — and Virus Total scans it with 40+ antivirus programs. Emsisoft is fine with it — and so are we.

2. We have actually tested this program on several different computers running different versions of Windows — the program works on all versions of Windows and it works on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

It doesn’t get much easier. Again if you need help, click the Help button on the bottom left. The author offers his description and advice:

Free Video to GIF Converter has user-friendly interface. You can easily understand how to convert video to gif animation and use its editing functions. It includes two steps:

Step1, Extract video to pictures/frames;

Step2, Merge pictures/frames into animated GIF.

The easiest way, just add your video, click “Next” button and then click “Make GIF” button – then you get the GIF. This often works well.

For more details, read (the) following.

step 1: Extract Video to frames

Click browse video to add your video into Free Video to GIF Converter and it will show you the duration and size of your video. In most cases, you just need to set the start and end time, width and height for output gif file in this step.

In Step1, you can do:

1. Trim video to convert a segment of video to animated gif. Just set the start and end time. Note: The end time is 00:00:30 by default. The maximum value of end time is equal to the duration of source video.

2. Customize the width and height of output gif file.

3. Select extracting frame rate. You can change extracting frame rate from 1 to 20. If this value is bigger, the extracted frames will be more, but look more continuous. I suggest keeping the default value for begginers (sic).

This guy doesn’t play games with the download; you can download Free Video to GIF Converter from here.

Now, if you deserve to see an actual video of EB and how she really is. Keep in mind, she’s into the new “wild-bush-look”…I really think the horns look nice, but I’m not sure about the bone in her nose, or the odd make-up. I really love the skirt she’s wearing. I told her she really needs a spear but she never listens to me.

Here is your chance to see EB in action — and this GIF was made by using the two programs featured in this article, and nothing else, I tells ya!

EB dressed for a party– chasing children to get their candy…