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 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

default

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

c-64_d-bayer2_r

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

c-8_d-bayer5_f-15

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

subtitles

dependencies

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

required: ffmpeg, ffprobe, grep
optional: gifsicle