Making Animated GIFs With Free Software in Four Steps

Note: this is not Linux-specific. the commands are essentially the same on the windows version of mplayer. The GIMP is also cross platform. see the comments for more details.

MPlayer is a pretty powerful tool for processing video files. It has a built-in command line option that will export specified movie frames to a GIF. Such a feature seems like it would make the guide I'm presenting here obsolete, but the problem with the feature is that the resultant GIF looks terrible: too few colors. As far as I've seen, the best way to get good quality animated GIFs using only free software involves using a combination of MPlayer's command line tools and a little bit of elbow grease in The GIMP. We will export the desired segment of video to a series of JPEG files, then use The GIMP to combine those files into a nicely animating GIF that should look nearly as good as the original video. I believe that it is possible to get MPlayer and The GIMP together in a script that will allow the end user to simply point the script to the desired movie file and the desired segment and the script will do all the "dirty work" and create the GIF. This is my end goal, but I have not taken the time necessary to learn any of GIMP's scripting language. If there is a pre-existing solution that allows one to do what I am trying to show here, I'd love to know about it, so please let me know.

Step 1 (for Debian or Ubuntu users):

sudo apt-get install gimp mplayer

Step 2:

mplayer -ao null -loop 0 -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi

This command will display the segment of file.avi on your screen that runs from 11:22 to five seconds later (11:27). It will loop infinitely until you close the window or send a ctrl+c to the terminal window. This command is useful for figuring out what your GIF will look like before you make it. The audio output will not be heard (is set to null)

Step 3:

mplayer -ao null -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi -vo jpeg:outdir=moviedirectory

This command actually creates the jpeg files you will need to make your animated gif. It is similar to the other command, but nothing is displayed on screen, and the command will not loop forever. The command will output the segment to a series of jpeg files in a directory called "moviedirectory".

Step 4:

Now that we have our directory full of jpegs, we should open the first of these files in The GIMP. Then, open the remainder of the images in the directory as layers (File -> Open As Layers). Every image in that directory should now be a layer. Now save the file as a .gif and choose to "save as animation" as opposed to "flatten image." Click export. Lastly, it is important to make sure "loop forever" is checked if you want a GIF that loops forever. The other options here can drastically change the effect of your gif because they change the speed that the gif is displayed at. A relatively fast gif will have a 15 millisecond delay between frames. The default delay of 100 ms is a bit slow in my opinion. Under frame disposal where unspecified I select "one frame per layer." I check "Use delay entered above for all frames" and "Use disposal entered above for all frames." Here are examples of the end result:





If you find that your image is too large, it is often helpful to resize it to be a bit smaller. This can help with the image's performance.

As Firefox is often the platform where people will be viewing your animated gif files, it is also a good tool to use to test them to see what the final product looks like.


If you liked this or thought it was cool, you should read my guide on using FFmpeg.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment.