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.

Usage

$ 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 screencp.mp4 -f 15

Credits

gifgen is pretty much just the information from this blog article wrapped up in a shell script. Full credit goes to the original author.

License

MIT © Luke Childs