video2gif

video2gif eases converting any video into a GIF.

It uses FFmpeg, so it understands any video that FFmpeg does. It has an array of options to allow you to select the part of the video you want, crop it automatically, overlay text, and manipulate the color and brightness.

Currently, video2gif is in alpha status: it is feature-incomplete, not guaranteed to work at all, and subject to change features, options, or defaults. The patch-level version will increment for each change until it is ready for beta status.

Planned before beta status is

• full documentation, including a manual page;
• full tests, including integration tests using ffmpeg;
• feature and configuration stability;
• better output, such as error output;
• friendlier command-line configuration;
• the ability to configure text-based subtitles; and
• the ability to incorporate subtitles from an external file.

video2gif is a command-line tool requiring both Ruby and a recent version of FFmpeg installed and available in the system $PATH. If you can run ffmpeg and ffprobe from the command line, you likely have the ability to run video2gif.

Note that some features may not work by default. For example, tonemapping (used for HDR videos) requires libzimg support, not included by default in the FFmpeg supplied by Homebrew. If you attempt to use it, you will get an error.

video2gif also requires Ruby and the ability to install a new gem. If you have this available, run the following command to install it.

gem install video2gif

The general syntax for the command follows.

video2gif <input video> [<output filename>] [<options>]

Use video2gif --help to see all the options available. Given an input video, video2gif has a reasonable set of defaults to output a GIF of the same size and with the same name in the same directory. However, using the options available, you can change the output filename and the appearance of the resulting GIF.

Further documentation to come.

This gem is released into the public domain (CC0 license). For details, see: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode

To contribute to this plugin, find it on GitHub. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file accompanying it for guidelines.

https://github.com/emilyst/video2gif