Use a GIF as a Zoom Virtual Background

Stuck in boring Zoom meetings? Have the perfect gif you want to use as your "Zoom Virtual Background", but Zoom won't let you use animated gifs?

There's an easy solution - using ffmpeg to convert your GIF to an MP4.

You can install ffmpeg with brew or other package manager if you're on a UNIX-like system. Otherwise downloads are available here.

Once you have ffmpeg installed just run the following in your terminal, replacing <gif-file.gif> with the path to your gif.

ffmpeg -i <gif-file.gif> -vf scale=w=640:h=360:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase output.mp4

The flags on the command specify a minimum size of 640 by 360, Zoom's minimum video size, while maintaining aspect ratio by increasing either dimension.