Using youtube-dl and gifify from the command-line to make a cat gif

catdrawer-youtube-to-gif-README.md

Using youtube-dl and gifify from the command-line

Turn this cute YouTube cat video into a briefer-but-still-cute GIF:

Software to download

• youtube-dl is a command-line tool for quickly downloading video files from a given YouTube URL
• the gifify utility for converting video into GIFs, which is part of the gifsicle library.

Installing youtube-dl

Homebrew can be used to install both youtube-dl:

brew install youtube-dl 

We will use docker for gifify. Please note that gifify is no longer maintained by the creator.

Commands to run

# downloads from the given YouTube URL to the file path of `catdrawer.mp4`
youtube-dl "https://youtu.be/sP1_rT0wyQo" -o catdrawer.mp4

# creates a copy of `catdrawer.mp4` and converts seconds 19 to 27 to a GIF file named `catdrawer.gif`
docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data maxogden/gifify catdrawer.mp4 -o catdrawer.gif  --from 19 --to 27 --resize 400:-1 --colors 128

Then upload to Imgur. You could probably write a curl command to do it via Imgur's API

Piping youtube-dl to stdout

As victorperin points out in the original version, instead of downloading and saving a MP4 file with youtube-dl, we can pipe the MP4 file to stdout and directly into gifify. This means that the intermediary catdrawer.mp4 is never saved to disk:

youtube-dl "https://youtu.be/sP1_rT0wyQo" -o - \
   | gifify -o catdrawer.gif --from 19 --to 27 --resize 400:-1 --colors 128