gifmaker

A tool for extracting gifs from videos.

Requirements:

You would need the commandline tool avprobe installed on your computer. It is a part of libav package. On OS X, you can install this with brew install libav.

Sample Usage:

• To extract the first five seconds of a video:

  python gifmaker.py -d 5 input.mp4 output.gif

• To extract the 5 to 10 second portion:

  python gifmaker.py -s 5 -d 5 input.mp4 output.gif

• Want a looped gif? Just throw in a -l/--loop

  python gifmaker.py -s 5 -d 5 --loop input.mp4 output.gif

Reducing the output size / Gif optimizations

Gifs are optimized by default, but output files might get quite big easily. In order to reduce the output file size, the following can be done:

• Reduce the gif dimensions

  This can be accomplished via the --scale argument, which takes a float as an argument, and scales the output accordingly.

  For example:

  python gifmaker.py --scale=0.5 input.mp4 output.gif

  would scale the gif width and height to half the input dimensions.

• Change the fuzz factor.

  Increasing the fuzz will decrease the output quality and file size. Between 2% and 5%, the quality isn't severely degraded and the output size will decrease dramatically.

  For example:

  python gifmaker.py --fuzz 5 input.mp4 output.gif

• Skip frames.

  You may skip frames, thus reducing the framerate and the output size accordingly:

  python gifmaker.py --frameskip 1/3 input.mp4 output.gif

  would skip one third of the input frames.

• I dont want my gif to be optimized!

  I have no idea why anyone would ever want this, but optimization can be avoided using the --no-optimize flag

Controlling the gif speed

Speed can be controlled via the --speed argument. For example

python gifmaker input.mp4 output.gif -s 10 -d 5 --speed=2

would create a gif that plays twice as fast, conversely

python gifmaker input.mp4 output.gif -s 10 -d 5 --speed=.5

would create a slow motion gif.