A Bash script to convert a video file to an animated GIF.
Puts an emphasis on simplicity of use and quality of the GIF. I wrote it because I was stuggling to find an alternative method that provided these benefits. I tried using ffmpeg on its own for example, but I could never get the quality of the GIF quite right. The recommendation seemed to be to export to still frames first, then use ImageMagick to convert the frames to a GIF – which is exactly what this script does.
You'll need to have ffmpeg and ImageMagick installed. You can do that on a Mac by installing Homebrew and then doing:
brew install imagemagick ffmpeg
Then to get the script itself you can do:
git clone git@github.com:paulherron/giffer.git
You can copy the script to your preferred location, or symlink it into place.
The simplest way to use it is like:
giffer -i my_video.mp4
There are other options too, which you can see by doing:
giffer -h
To give an idea of the options available, here's an example command that sets custom input and output names, conversion method and frame rate, and prompts you before generating the file:
giffer -i custom_file.mp4 -o final.gif -r 10 -m optimize -c