make-gif

despite the recent rise of libvpx, there’s still something magical about the humble animated gif and it’s status as not-quite-video-or-image. however, given the limitations of the file format, creating gifs which can hold their own (at least in terms of appearance) against these modern video formats is not easy.

this script aims to provide a featureful frontend to ffmpeg which makes creating high-quality gifs from video files as painless as possible, with support for things like embedding subtitles, various dithering algorithms, cropping, and post-optimisation (via gifsicle)

just clone and run make-gif --help to get started!

examples

some example usages and their outputs:

make-gif -o -s 36:18 -l 3 菊次郎の夏.mkv out.gif

make-gif -or -s 36:18 -l 3 -c 64 -d bayer2 菊次郎の夏.mkv out.gif

make-gif -o -s 36:18 -l 3 -c 8 -d bayer5 -f 15 -w 320 菊次郎の夏.mkv out.gif

make-gif -o -b -s 16:21 -l 3.5 'Christiane F.mkv' out.gif

dependencies

in addition to being run via zsh, make-gif makes use of the following external commands:

• required: ffmpeg, ffprobe, grep
• optional: gifsicle