We have to generate a custom color palette so we don’t waste space storing colors we don’t use (the gif file format is limited to 256 colors): ffmpeg -ss 2.6 -t 1.3 -i MVI_7035.MOV -vf fps=15,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png Learned a lot from this blog about the color palette algorithms.įound a relatively simple example on stackoverflow. Let’s find out how to make it look more like a video… This has been pretty simple, but I know I’ve seen better looking gifs. If you have a longer video and want to define the starting position in hours, minutes, seconds, you can use “hh:mm:ss” format, like “00:00:03” instead of “3” ffmpeg -t 3 -ss 0.5 -i MVI_6663.MOV -r “15” fourthtry.gif Oh yeah, and your seconds can be decimals. I’ve got another one to convert that has kind of a long input video, so I’m going to specify a time to start the gif as well as the duration.

As an added benefit, the file is now 2 megabytes instead of 8 megabytes. t is used before the -i input, -r is used after the input, so it affects the output.) ffmpeg -t 2 -i MVI_6654.MOV -r “15” thirdtry.gif

Thanks to the -r flag, we can choose a frame rate for the output (note that these options do different things based on their order. So it loops! kinda slow tho, maybe we can drop every other frame? A-ha. ffmpeg -t 2 -i MVI_6654.MOV secondtry.gif But I bet I can make it loop nicely by just using the first few seconds, so we use the duration flag, -t and specify the duration in seconds. the filename at the end defines the conversion and creates the new file, resulting in: We’re calling the ffmpeg program and telling it that MVI_6654.MOV is our input file with the -i flag. After getting FFMPEG installed, let’s try it out on a MOV downloaded from my google photos account: ffmpeg -i MVI_6654.MOV firsttry.gif

Ffmpeg gif missing