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Hi,

Today I’m going to show you a very small script that allows you to convert any video (as long as it is supported by mplayer) to a GIF.

Required tools:

* mplayer

* convert

 

mplayer is popular media player available for multiple operating systems that support a wide range of video formats. The convert tool is an utility that lets you convert between multiple image formats among other definitions.  Since the mplayer takes screenshots using jpeg format, we need to use the convert tool to do the convertion to aGIF format.

 

Copy the following code, save it to a file and change its permissions (chmod a+x) and you are ready to roll 🙂

 

 

#!/bin/sh
TMPDIR=/tmp/animated
shopt -s nocaseglob
if [ ! -d "$TMPDIR" ]
then
        mkdir $TMPDIR
fi
 
\rm $TMPDIR/* &> /dev/null
 
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
        echo -e "Usage: $0    []\nExample:\n$0 00:15:11 10 myvideo.avi 320:240"
        exit 1
fi
 
if [ -n "$4" ]
then
        SCALE="scale=$4"
fi
 
echo "Generating screenshots. Please be patitent..."
mplayer -ao null -ss $1 -endpos $2 $3 -vo jpeg:outdir=$TMPDIR/ -vf $SCALE &> /dev/null
if [ -f $TMPDIR/00000001.jpg ]
then
        echo "Finished generating frames. Assembling the animated GIF..."
        convert -delay 5 $TMPDIR/*.jpg $TMPDIR/output.gif
        echo "Done! Please check the $TMPDIR/output.gif"
        exit 0
else
        echo -e "Oops\! Something went wrong and the frames were not generated. Check your parameters\!"
        exit 1
fi

Just try it and let me know 😉