Bdtyktl

I want make an animated .gif from an .mp4 video. I would prefer to do it from the command line, so please only list command line tools.

Two steps:

• 
  

  Extract Images from Video

  
  
  

  Create a directory called frames in the same directory with your .mp4 file.
  Use command:

  
  
  

  ffmpeg -i video.mp4  -r 5 'frames/frame-%03d.jpg'
  
  

  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  -r 5 stands for FPS value
  
      for better quality choose bigger number
  
      adjust the value with the -delay in 2nd step
  
      to keep the same animation speed
  
  
  
  %03d gives sequential filename number in decimal form
  
  

  
  
  

  ^source

  
  


• 
  

  Convert Images to gif

  
  
  

  cd frames
  
  convert -delay 20 -loop 0 *.jpg myimage.gif
  
  

  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  -delay 20 means the time between each frame is 0.2 seconds
  
     which match 5 fps above.
  
     When choosing this value
  
         1 = 100 fps
  
         2 = 50 fps
  
         4 = 25 fps
  
         5 = 20 fps
  
         10 = 10 fps
  
         20 = 5 fps
  
         25 = 4 fps
  
         50 = 2 fps
  
         100 = 1 fps
  
         in general 100/delay = fps
  
  
  
  -loop 0 means repeat forever
  
  

  
  
  

  Docs: convert gif options

  
  

You will end up with an rather big file, have a look at the image magick guide to optimize gif on options you can add to the second step command to obtain a smaller file.

ffmpeg 3.4.4 can do it directly on Ubuntu 18.04

You likely want to use something like:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

wget -O opengl-rotating-triangle.mp4 https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/opengl-rotating-triangle.mp4?raw=true

ulimit -Sv 1000000

ffmpeg 

  -i opengl-rotating-triangle.mp4 

  -r 15 

  -vf scale=512:-1 

  -ss 00:00:03 -to 00:00:06 

  opengl-rotating-triangle.gif

Test data generation procedure described on this post.

A more direct:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 out.gif

also works, but the output GIF would be way larger than the input video, because video formats compress intelligently across frames.

Argument breakdown:

• 
  

  ulimit -Sv 1000000: set a maximum 1Gb memory size for the program.

  
  
  

  Mostly me ensuring that the command is not using unlimited memory like certain previous attempts.

  
  
  

  500Mb makes ffmpeg fail to load shared libraries... time to upgrade your RAM?

  
  


• 
  

  -ss 00:00:03 -to 00:00:06: start and end time to cut the video from.

  
  
  

  No, GIFs are not the best way to pirate distribute videos online.

  
  
  

  See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18444194/cutting-the-videos-based-on-start-and-end-time-using-ffmpeg

  
  


• 
  

  -vf scale=512:-1: make the output 512 pixels in height, and adjust width to maintain the aspect ratio.

  
  
  

  This is common use case for images for the web, which tend to have much smaller resolution than video.

  
  
  

  If you remove this option, the output GIF has the same height as the input video.

  
  
  

  The original video height can be found for example with ffprobe: https://superuser.com/questions/595177/how-to-retrieve-video-file-information-from-command-line-under-linux/1035178#1035178 and is 1024 x 1024 in our case.

  
  


• 
  

  -r 15: sampling FPS.

  
  
  

  For example, the original video was 30 FPS, so -r 15 means that ffmpeg will pick one frame in every 2 (= 30 / 15).

  
  
  

  The perceived output FPS is adjusted to match the input however, so you won't notice a speedup, only greater granularity.

  
  
  

  The input FPS can be found with ffprobe, and the total number of input frames can be found with mediainfo as explained at: https://superuser.com/questions/84631/how-do-i-get-the-number-of-frames-in-a-video-on-the-linux-command-line/1044894#1044894

  
  
  

  I recommend this option because video formats usually have a higher framerate due to the larger resolution. With smaller GIFs, the lower framerate is less noticeable, and so we can skip some frames and make smaller GIFs.

  
  

Before pre 18.04: ffmpeg + convert one-liner without intermediate files

ffmpeg could not handle GIF previously. The best I had was something along:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg imagemagick

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 10 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm - | 

  convert -delay 5 -loop 0 - output.gif

Explanation of some of the arguments:

• -loop 0: add the Netscape Gif extension Loop count field to the output. 0 means infinite loop as described at: http://www.vurdalakov.net/misc/gif/netscape-looping-application-extension eog, firefox and chromium all loop infinitely by default even without it, so I'm not sure how necessary it is anymore.




• -delay 5: time waited before showing the next frame, in hundreths of second, as described at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF byte 324. So 100 means 1 FPS, 5 means 1 / 0.5 == 20FPS.

Even if you reduce the height and framerate, the output GIF may still be larger than the video, since "real" non-GIF video formats compress across frames, while GIF only compresses individual frames.

A direct:

convert input.mp4 rpi2-bare-metal-blink.gif

worked, but almost killed my computer because of memory overflow, and produced an ouptput 100x larger for my 2s 1Mb input file. Maybe one day ImageMagick will catch up.

See also: https://superuser.com/questions/556029/how-do-i-convert-a-video-to-gif-using-ffmpeg-with-reasonable-quality

Tested on Ubuntu 17.10.

gifify is an all-in-one node-based utility that simplifies the conversion. It depends on nodejs, npm, ffmpeg, and imagemagick which are all available in the repos.

Once you have npm installed you can install gifify globally with:

    npm install -g gifify

A video can be converted to a .GIF with:

    gifify video.mp4 -o video.gif

You can also optionally set a start and end position in the video and add a text caption:

    gifify clip.mp4 -o clip.gif --from 01:48:23.200 --to 01:48:25.300 --text 'we are the knights who say nip!'

❗️ It can take several minutes for the conversion to complete even with smaller videos.

NOTE: ffmpeg and imagemagick might need to be compiled with some specific libraries (i.e. libass and fontconfig accordingly).