What's the easiest way to save a GIFV as a simple GIF?
GIFV isn't a GIF at all, in the traditional sense anyway. It's actually a video file.
Here's what I read from Imgur's blog post introducing GIFV:
The cornerstone of Project GIFV is a platform-wide upgrade to automatically convert uploaded GIF files on the fly into the WebM or MP4 video formats, depending on browser support.
...
Project GIFV implements video in a way that looks and behaves exactly like a GIF.
If you right-clicked on a GIFV and selected Open link in new tab (or a similar option) you'd see that Imgur creates a minimalistic web page that it seems like you just opened a GIF in a new tab but right-click anywhere on the page and select View Source and you'll see that isn't the case.
To answer your question, the easiest way to save a GIFV as a GIF (if it is hosted on Imgur.com) is to open it in a new tab and click on the download link at the bottom.
If the GIFV is hosted on another site (not that I know of any other sites hosting GIFV) you can use either of the two online video conversion services:
- MP4 to GIF
- WEBM to GIF
NOTE: Downloading a GIFV as a proper GIF will most certainly increase the file size by a big margin. If you'd rather download the WEBM or MP4 video instead, you may right click on the GIFV and select Save video as... (or a similar option).
For Imgur URLs, if you remove the V from .gifv then you will get the original animated GIF.
(This might not be "a simple GIF" but could be a large file, as explained on Imgur's blog. Like in http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.gifv the embedded video is 3.4 MB, but the original animated GIF http://i.imgur.com/zvATqgs.gif is 46.7 MB.)