How to loop a video for TikTok, Reels, Instagram and YouTube

The free loop video tool repeats a clip in your browser and saves the result as one MP4. It runs on your device, so the video isn't uploaded, and there's no watermark and nothing to sign up for.

1. Choose your video. Trim it first if only part of it should repeat: a loop shows every wasted second again and again. The video trimmer does that.
2. Pick how it repeats: a number of times, or a length to fill.
3. Add a crossfade if the end doesn't match the start, so each join blends instead of jumping.
4. Download the looped video as an MP4.

The two ways to repeat suit different jobs:

Want to loop only a song under a video, not the picture? That's a different job: the add music to video tool loops a short track under a longer video.

A loop looks seamless when nothing changes at the join: the last frame flows into the first the way any two frames in the middle do. You get there when you film, when you cut, or with a blend.

• Film it to loop. Lock the camera (a tripod, or the phone propped on something), keep the light the same, and end where you started: the same pose, the hand back in the same place, the object back on the table. Movement that passes through the frame (water, traffic, a crowd, clouds) loops more easily than movement that goes somewhere.
• Cut on the matching frame. Scrub near the end for the frame that looks most like the first, and trim right before it, so the frame after the last one is the first. For repeating motion (a swing, a spin, a walk cycle), cut at the same point of the cycle at both ends.
• Crossfade the end into the start. Lay the last half second over the first, fading one out as the other fades in. It hides a small jump in light or position, and it's what the free tool's crossfade does. It shortens each pass by the length of the fade, and it looks like a dissolve when the two ends differ a lot.
• Ping-pong it. Play the clip forward, then backward. The join always matches, because the backward copy starts on the forward copy's last frame. It suits motion that looks fine in reverse, and it's the Boomerang look.

Mind the sound. A picture that loops cleanly with a voice cut mid-word still jumps. For music, cut on a bar line so the beat carries on; for room sound or ambience, a short audio crossfade at the join; for speech, end on a full stop, or mute it and lay one track across the whole loop.

On TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, a video starts again when it ends, until the viewer swipes away. So you don't need to loop a clip before you post it there: post it once, and make its end lead back into its start. Repeating it inside the file only makes it longer, and a short video that plays its point twice reads as padded.

Whether a replay adds to the view count is a different question, and only YouTube answers it in public:

On YouTube, the bigger count doesn't change the money: YouTube says Partner Program eligibility and Shorts ad revenue sharing are based on engaged views, and when it began counting every format's views the moment a video starts to play (August 2026), it said again that revenue and eligibility still rely on engaged views and engaged watch time. So a loop that makes the number climb without anyone choosing to keep watching doesn't earn more. Our guide to the Shorts algorithm covers what the feed weighs instead.

The loop starts with the clip. A short that gets replayed is a strong moment, cut tight. If yours are in long videos (a podcast, a stream, an interview), Clyper finds them for you: it reads the transcript, picks the moments that stand alone, cuts each on whole sentences, frames it 9:16 on whoever's talking and captions every word, ready to post where it will loop by itself.

To watch a YouTube video on repeat, turn on loop in the player. YouTube's help page gives these steps:

• On a computer: right-click the video player and choose Loop. The video repeats until you turn it off the same way.
• In the YouTube app: on the watch page, tap Settings, then Additional settings, then Loop video.
• A playlist: tap Loop in the playlist box to repeat the whole list; tap it again to repeat only the current video.
• On a TV or console: use the Repeat button in the player's controls.

Shorts replay by themselves in the Shorts player, so there's nothing to turn on.

On your own website, an embedded video loops with two settings added to the embed address, the loop setting and a playlist of the same video, as YouTube's player documentation explains: https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID?playlist=VIDEO_ID&loop=1, with the video's ID in both places.

As the creator, you can't make a long video loop for everyone who watches it. If the video itself should run on repeat (an hour of rain, a background for a stream), loop it to that length before you upload it.

Editors don't have a “repeat 5 times” button: you duplicate the clip on the timeline as many times as you need. The loop button you'll find in most of them only replays the preview while you edit; it doesn't change the exported video.

With ffmpeg, the -stream_loop option repeats the input without re-encoding it:

A GIF loops on its own wherever it's shown, with no player and no settings, which is why it's still the format for a loop in a chat, an email, a slide or a README. But it has no sound, only 256 colors in a frame, and it's big: about 3.1 MB for 4 seconds at 480 × 270 and 15 fps with the free GIF maker. The same seconds as an MP4 are many times smaller, sharper and in full color.

For a GIF, use the free video to GIF converter; for a video loop, the loop video tool. To join different clips one after another instead of the same one, see how to merge videos.