How To Create Animated GIFs With FFmpeg
Learn to install and use this free video converter
I use animated GIFs in my articles to show commands at work in my terminal, see here for an example. The beauty of an animated GIF is that it is embeddable on a webpage like any other image. There are no plugins or video tags needed, so it works on many devices and platforms.
If you want to teach or show your readers something, and don’t want to resort to YouTube to host a video of it, consider an animated GIF. Just keep in mind that animated GIFs are not the most efficient at storing video, so the file size can grow very quickly if you’re not taking the proper precautions.
So how do you create an animated GIF? You can find a plethora of video converters out there. I abandoned all these programs for an open-source and free tool called FFmpeg. FFmpeg is actually at the core of many video tools and websites.
The name is anything but attractive. That it is a command-line tool might put off even more people. But it’s not that difficult, and I’m convinced you can be up and running with FFmpeg by the end of this tutorial!
What is FFmpeg?
The definition given by the project itself describes it better than I can:
“FFmpeg is the leading…
