HOWTO: Create an animated gif from a video with command line tools

Sometimes I see a few seconds of a video I’m watching and I think that it’d make a great animated gif. But because I don’t always have access to a bunch of graphics software, and because I might be using my Ubuntu or OS X box, it’s nice to have a process that works with widely- and freely-available free software command line tools. So I’ve worked out a process that uses the command line and requires only the programs mplayer, imagemagick, and gifsicle. Here’s how it goes:

  1. Make sure you have the programs installed. On Ubuntu (or most anything Debian-based with large enough repositories — these are common programs) it should just be a matter of

    sudo apt-get install mplayer imagemagick gifsicle

    On Mac OS X, first install the Homebrew package manager, and then install these programs with

    brew install mplayer imagemagick gifsicle

  2. Isolate the segment of video you want to clip out. You’re just looking for a timestamp, so you can do this in any video player. Once you’ve got a rough clip selected, use mplayer to export that to image files. You can use the following line to do that (there are some example values in there that I’ll explain afterward):

    mplayer -ao null -ss 0:02:06 -endpos 5 -vo gif89a:outdir=gif videofile.mp4

    Here’s what each flag means.

    • -ao means audio output. It’s set to null, because there’s no sound.
    • -ss is the start position. What follows is the H:MM:SS timestamp of the beginning of the clip you want.
    • -endpos is the end position of the clip, in seconds. So here I’ve taken out a 5 second clip.

    • -vo is the video output. The next bit says to output gifs (that’s gif89a into the directory called “gif”. You can put them into whatever directory you want of course.

      For some reason the I don’t have the gif89a video output driver installed on my OS X computer, so I instead use png or jpeg in the place of gif89a up there. Your mileage may vary.

  3. You now should have a directory full of stills. In case you used any other format to output them, I use one line of imagemagick’s mogrify to convert them:

    mogrify -format gif *.png

  4. Then go through and remove the images at the start and the end that you don’t want in the final gif. Sometimes I cheat on the command line here, and just look at all the pictures with Preview or Image Viewer and delete the ones I don’t need.

  5. Finally, use gifsicle to wrap it all up into an animated gif. I usually start with the line

    gifsicle --colors=256 --delay=4 --loopcount=0 --dither -O3 *.gif > animation.gif

    and then tweak the parameters from there. Different source material calls for different settings, and I try to keep the final output as small as possible.

If you make a lot of gifs and like to mess with a lot of values, it might make sense for you to do it graphically. But this flow works pretty well for me.