gifski

[Grogan]

I heard about this command line utility for making animated gifs, with thousands of colours (instead of the usual 256 colour limitation of the .gif format). You can either make it from a video (pipe ffmpeg output to it) or first generate frames.

Main site:
https://gif.ski/

Github repo:
https://github.com/ImageOptim/gifski/

Gifski makes smooth GIF animations using advanced techniques that work around the GIF format's limitations. Share your clips in their full quality, not a bland dithered mess.

Gifski lets you resize animations and tweak compression levels, so you can make your GIFs fit within upload file size limits. It's more advanced than a simple color reduction.

Gifski uses pngquant for the best palettes with temporal dithering. It can achieve thousands of colors per frame. It supports true lossy LZW compression and temporal smoothing and denoising.

It's written in Rust, so all I had to do (to use the standalone binary, I didn't install the library) was clone it and run:

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cargo build --release

Then I took the gifski binary from target/release (I stripped it) and stuck it in /usr/local/bin

I just grabbed a short at random from youtube to test this. At first it was a 31 Mb file, I don't want a gif that large so I reduced the framerate and the video dimensions

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ffmpeg -i filename.mp4 -f yuv4mpegpipe - | gifski --fps 10 --width 180 -o filename.gif -

It got it down to 5 Mb. (really it's too long of a video... I don't have any video editing software at this time so I can't chop it)

The program probably has more options I'm unaware of. Anyway, not a bad test:

deathwishtest2.gif (5.39 MiB) Viewed 577 times