Convert video into high quality GIF

README.md

This is the way I found to create high quality GIFs from videos. Feel free to recommend a better path or tool.

1. Install ffmpeg. Make sure ffplay is installed along with ffmpeg. For example for macOS:

   brew install ffmpeg --with-ffplay

2. If the original video has black bars at the top/bottom, you can remove them:
   1. Detect the values for the cropping filter using ffplay. The cropdetect filter is configured with the arguments cropdetect=limit:round:reset, 24:16:0is the default.

      ffplay -i video.mp4 -vf "cropdetect=24:16:0"
      # At the end of each line from the output you will find the values for the cropping filter. E.g. crop=1280:656:0:72

   2. Let's crop using the cropping filter values.

      ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf crop=1280:656:0:72 -c:a copy video_cropped.mp4

3. Use this script to convert your video into GIF.

   videotogif.sh input.mp4 output.gif

videotogif.sh

#!/bin/sh

palette="/tmp/palette.png"

filters="fps=15,scale=1280:-1:flags=lanczos"

ffmpeg -v warning -i $1 -vf "$filters,palettegen" -y $palette
ffmpeg -v warning -i $1 -i $palette -lavfi "$filters [x]; [x][1:v] paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=5" -y $2

Works with other formats as .mov too