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OS X Screencast to Animated GIF
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GIF-Screencast-OSX.md

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Screencapture GIF

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

  • Open "Quicktime Player",
  • Go to File -> New Screen Recording
  • Selected screen portion by dragging a rectangle, recorded 13 second video.
  • Go to File -> Export -> As Movie
    • Saved the video in full quality with the filename in.mov

To convert in.mov into out.gif (filesize: 48KB), open Terminal to the folder with in.mov and run the following command:

ffmpeg -i in.mov -s 600x400 -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 10 -f gif - | gifsicle --optimize=3 --delay=3 > out.gif

Notes on the arguments:

  • -r 10 tells ffmpeg to reduce the frame rate from 25 fps to 10
  • -s 600x400 tells ffmpeg the max-width and max-height
  • --delay=3 tells gifsicle to delay 300ms between each gif
  • --optimize=3 requests that gifsicle use the slowest/most file-size optimization

Installation

The conversion process requires the following command-line tools:

  • ffmpeg to process the video file
  • gifsicle to create and optimize the an animated gif

If you use homebrew and homebrew-cask software packages, just type this in:

brew install ffmpeg 
brew cask install x-quartz #dependency for gifsicle, only required for mountain-lion and above
open /usr/local/Cellar/x-quartz/2.7.4/XQuartz.pkg # runs the XQuartz installer
brew install gifsicle

Resources

Related Ideas

  • Extend https://github.com/dergachev/copy-public-url folder action for this use case
    • it would automate the conversion before copying Dropbox public URL
    • assign the folder action to ~/Dropbox/Public/Screenshots/gif
    • consider finding a way to simplify the dependency installation
@robertoentringer
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robertoentringer commented Jul 10, 2019

@baumandm thanks for share this !

To facility the usage I created a small function in my .bash_profile :

function movtogif () {
  tempfile=.mov-to-gif-$(date +"%s").png
  ffmpeg -v quiet -stats -y -i $1 -vf fps=10,palettegen $tempfile
  ffmpeg -v quiet -stats -i $1 -i $tempfile -filter_complex "fps=10,paletteuse" "${1%.mov}.gif"
  rm $tempfile
}

Usage

$ movtogif filename.mov

P.S.: tested on macOS Mojave !

@nick
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nick commented Aug 21, 2020

Another version that also reduces the dimensions by 50% (useful if you're recording on a retina screen):

function movtogif () {
  tempfile=.mov-to-gif-$(date +"%s").png
  ffmpeg -v quiet -i $1 -vf "scale=iw*.5:ih*.5" "${1%.mov}-resized.mov"
  ffmpeg -v quiet -stats -y -i "${1%.mov}-resized.mov" -vf fps=10,palettegen $tempfile
  ffmpeg -v quiet -stats -i "${1%.mov}-resized.mov" -i $tempfile -filter_complex "fps=10,paletteuse" "${1%.mov}.gif"
  rm $tempfile "${1%.mov}-resized.mov"
}

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