Video to animated GIF using FFMPEG

Source

High quality GIF with FFmpeg

How to make GIFs with FFMPEG

TL;DR

copy this code

#!/bin/sh

start_time=00:10
duration=00:08

palette="/tmp/palette.png"

filters="fps=15,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos"

ffmpeg -v warning -ss $start_time -t $duration -i $1 -vf "$filters,palettegen" -y $palette
ffmpeg -v warning -ss $start_time -t $duration -i $1 -i $palette -lavfi "$filters [x]; [x][1:v] paletteuse" -y $2

open a new document on your text editor and paste it there.

Save it (videotogif.sh) and make it executable

chmod +x videotogif.sh

Place this file in the same folder your video is.

BEFORE using it

edit this lillte program to suit your preferences, mainly:

• start_time = minutes:seconds
• duration = minutes:seconds
• fps = frame rate (keep it as it is but you can play with this setting)
• scale = scale video to 320px_horizontal:keep_proportions (with example settings)

palette is a temporary file created on runtime, don't need to change it.

Conversion

execute this script as

./videotogif.sh input_video.mkv  output_gif.gif

name files as you wanted.

animated gif, just 320px wide 4.2Mb

Make a video instead

If you don't need a gif that loops endlessly, just make a short video and it's likely it has better image quality and smaller file size (better for websites load).

ffmpeg -ss 00:10 -t 8 -i input.mp4 -vf scale=640x480:flags=lanczos -c:v libx264 -preset faster  -an output.mp4

tip: place -ss and -t parameters before input.file; set scale as you needed.

640x480 video, 18 seconds just 2.7Mb

Video Source: Bring a little lovin - Los Bravos