Idea: Quickly generate animated GIF or APNG of video?

[MikeRich88]

How quickly could FFmpeg generate an animated GIF of a video? Just using the same frames we get now on the sidebar. It already takes some time, but not too long to extract the frames (which I assume are keyframes).

Will QuickLook in the Finder accept and display such a GIF with the animation?

It would be sort of grainy though. Actually the Finder also supports APNG (Animated PNG). At least in 12.7.1 it does. That would be a better option. APNG is probably faster to generate as well since we don't have to dither anything.

Either way you would leave maybe 1 or 2 seconds between each frame in the animation.

Maybe this could be an experimental option somewhere.

Also, it would be acceptable when in the GIF/APNG mode to scale anything larger than 720p down to 720p or even 480p. Perhaps with 480p, the number of key frames could be doubled. (Then you would want to cut the time between each one a little bit).

Still no sound, but its a half of a step closer to the glory days when you could install Perian and preview almost any video ever made right in the Finder. I was messing around on an old iMac from 2009 that had Leopard and Perian on it and it was amazing.

[Kagami]

It might be possible to display videos by generating HTML with <video> tag in it: #3 (comment)

But of course it will only display the file types which Safari supports. So some formats like .avi with H.263 won't work.