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How to Convert Videos to gifs using FFmpeg

Introduction

Have you ever wanted to create a short, animated gif from a video clip. I wanted to find a tool that is easy to use and easily accessible. While there are plenty of online video converts, they often come with watermarks, quality limitations, or privacy concerns.

Take control of the process using FFmpeg, a free, open-source command-line tool that is the gold standard for handling multimedia files.

Prerequisites

To follow along, you need the following tools:

  1. A video file you want to convert
  2. A computer with a command-line interface (Terminal on macOS/Linux, Command Prompt or PowerShell on Windows)

What is FFmpeg?

FFmpeg is a powerful suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files. It can do almost anything you can imagine with media: convert formats, scale resolutions, extract audio, create slideshows, and much more. While it might seem intimidating at first, the commands are logical and incredibly powerful once you understand the basic structure.

  1. Download ffmpeg from their main site.
https://ffmpeg.org/

  1. Select the platform/OS you use.

  2. For Windows, add the bin to the environmental paths.

  3. Convert your video using the following command in the terminal.

ffmpeg -i <video_name.ext> <outputname.gif>
  1. Can modify the output even more by looking up the documentations.