You will also need a sample video file to test the commands with. FFmpeg v2.6 was released in 2015, so you should be fine if you have installed FFmpeg more recently. Versions higher than v2.6 include the palettegen and paletteuse filters, which you will learn more about later in this article. To generate a GIF from a video, you will need FFmpeg v2.6 or higher. If you don't have FFmpeg installed, you can download it from the official FFmpeg website. You can check if FFmpeg is installed by running the following command in your terminal: ffmpeg -version To follow along with this tutorial, make sure you have FFmpeg installed. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is a command-line tool that can be used to convert video and audio files, as well as perform other tasks such as video streaming, recording, editing and transcoding. What is FFmpeg?įFmpeg is free and open-source software used for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. In this article, we will show you how to convert a video to an animated GIF using FFmpeg. While it is possible to use Shotstacks video editing or media transformation APIs to generate animated GIFs, you may just want to do this manually on your own computer. But how do you go about converting a video to an animated GIF? Short snippets from films and television shows are often turned into GIFs and used to create memes.
Common scenarios are in emails, where videos are not supported, or on websites, where you want the animation to autoplay. Animated GIFs are often used where it is difficult or impractical to use video files.