gifgen/README.md

# gifgen

> Simple high quality GIF encoding

If you've ever tried encoding GIFs with `ffmpeg` there's a good chance your results came out looking pretty bad. This is because GIFs are limited to a palette of 256 colours and `ffmpeg` just uses a generic palette to be able to cover a wide range of colours.

`gifgen` produces much better results by doing a 2-pass encode. The first pass generates a custom colour palette based on all of the pixels from each frame. The second pass encodes the GIF using this palette instead of the default one bundled with `ffmpeg`.

**ffmpeg default:**

![ffmpeg default](gifs/bbb-default.gif)

**gifgen:**

![gifgen](gifs/bbb-gifgen.gif)

## Usage

```shell
$ gifgen -h
Usage: gifgen [options]

Options
  -i   Input file
  -o   Output file [input.gif]
  -f   Frames per second [10]
  -v   Display verbose output from ffmpeg

Examples:
  $ gifgen -i screencap.mp4
  $ gifgen -i SCM_1457.mov -o demo.gif
  $ gifgen -i screencap.mp4 -f 15
```

## Installation

### macOS

```shell
brew tap lukechilds/tap
brew install gifgen
```

### Linux

Just clone this repo and either copy/symlink `gifgen` to your PATH or run the script directly with `./gifgen`. Requires `ffmpeg` to be installed.

## Credits

`gifgen` is pretty much just the information from [this blog article](http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html) wrapped up in a shell script. Full credit goes to the original [author](http://ubitux.fr/).

## License

MIT © Luke Childs