gifify

Convert any video file to an optimized animated GIF. Either in it's full length or only a part of it.

It's like jclem/gifify but better in many ways from my point of view.

Demo time

This screencast was recorded with lolilolicon/FFcast then converted to a GIF with:

gifify screencast.mkv -o screencast.gif --resize 800:-1

Features

I believe my gifify has some features that jclem/gifify is lacking, see:

• command line interface
• programmatic JavaScript (Node.JS) stream interface
• unix friendly, supports stdin & stdout
• optimized! uses pornel/giflossy to generate light GIFS
• lots of options: movie speed, fps, colors, compression, resize, from & to, subtitles
• no temp files used, everything happens in memory
• fast! Extracting a 5 seconds GIF from the middle of a 2 hours movie takes less than 20 seconds

Requirements

Before using gifify, please install:

• Node.js ($ brew install node)
• FFmpeg 🐓🐓🐓🐓 ($ brew install ffmpeg --with-libass --with-fontconfig)
• convert, the famous ImageMagick ($ brew install imagemagick --with-fontconfig)
• pornel/giflossy, it's a gifsicle fork

You can also use the gifify Docker image which comes with everything installed.

Installation

npm install -g gifify

Command line usage

> gifify -h

  Usage: gifify [options] [file]

  Options:

    -h, --help              output usage information
    -V, --version           output the version number
    --colors <n>            Number of colors, up to 255, defaults to 80
    --compress <n>          Compression (quality) level, from 0 (no compression) to 100, defaults to 40
    --from <position>       Start position, hh:mm:ss or seconds, defaults to 0
    --fps <n>               Frames Per Second, defaults to 10
    -o, --output <file>     Output file, defaults to stdout
    --resize <W:H>          Resize output, use -1 when specifying only width or height. `350:100`, `400:-1`, `-1:200`
    --speed <n>             Movie speed, defaults to 1
    --subtitles <filepath>  Subtitle filepath to burn to the GIF
    --text <string>         Add some text at the bottom of the movie
    --to <position>         End position, hh:mm:ss or seconds, defaults to end of movie

Programmatic usage

See the example.

var fs = require('fs');
var gifify = require('gifify');
var path = require('path');

var input = path.join(__dirname, 'movie.mp4');
var output = path.join(__dirname, 'movie.gif');

var gif = fs.createWriteStream(output);

var options = {
  resize: '200:-1',
  from: 30,
  to: 35
};

gifify(input, options).pipe(gif);

You can also pass a readable stream to gifify(stream, opts).

Readable stream input performance

Gifify supports streams both on command line (cat movie.mp4 | gifify -o out.gif) and in the programmatic API (gifify(readableStream, opts).pipe(writableStream)).

While it's super useful in some cases, if you have the file on disk already, you better do gifify movie.mp4 -o out.gif or gifify(filePath, opts).pipe(writableStream).

Why? Because piping 3.4GB when you want to cut from 40:20 to 40:22 still takes a loooooot of time and does not gives you any performance benefit.

FFmpeg has to read from 0GB -> $START_BYTE_40:20 and discards it. But everything flows in your memory.

When using direct file input from command line, we pass the -i filename option to FFmpeg and then it's super fast!

Be careful when |piping.

Adding some text

You can burn some simple text into your GIF:

gifify back.mp4 -o back.gif --from 01:48:23.200 --to 01:48:25.300 --text "What?..What?What?"

Result:

Subtitles

You can burn subtitles into your GIF, it's that easy:

gifify 22.mkv -o movie.gif --subtitles 22.ass --from 1995 --to 2002 --resize 600:-1

You must create new subtitles files, the timecodes for the complete film will not work for a five seconds GIF.

Create subtitles using aegisub and augment the font size for a great effect!

Here's the 22.ass from the previous command, created with aegisub:

[Script Info]
; Script generated by Aegisub 3.2.1
; http://www.aegisub.org/
Title: Default Aegisub file
ScriptType: v4.00+
WrapStyle: 0
ScaledBorderAndShadow: yes
YCbCr Matrix: None

[Aegisub Project Garbage]

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,1

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:02.50,0:00:03.97,Default,,0,0,0,,{\fnLiberation Sans\fs40}Okay, okay.
Dialogue: 0,0:00:05.00,0:00:06.90,Default,,0,0,0,,{\fnLiberation Sans\fs40}Okay. Okay.

Result extracting a GIF from 22 Jump Street:

GIF Performance

On modern hardware GIF is the slowest and most expensive video codec. Can we please allow it to be obsoleted?

https://pornel.net/efficient-gifs#sec44

YOLO!

Giflossy

Giflossy is a fork of gifsicle, gifsicle author is currently working on integrating the lossy part in gifsicle.

So in little time we will be able to directly use gifsicle and gifiscle packages.

Thanks

jclem/gifify was a great source of inspiration.