Bash script for converting a video file to a small animated gif. Requires ffmpeg and imagemagick to be installed and accessible.

convert_to_gif.sh

#!/bin/bash
echo "USAGE"
echo "convert_to_gif.sh <video_file_name> <frames_per_second>"
echo "--------------------"
 
# from here:
# http://superuser.com/questions/556029/how-do-i-convert-a-video-to-gif-using-ffmpeg-with-reasonable-quality
 
# add the "-ss 2 -t 6" arguments after the ffmpeg to skip 2 seconds and have a duration of 6 secs
 
ffmpeg -y -i $1 \
-vf fps=$2,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png
 
ffmpeg -i $1 -i palette.png -filter_complex \
"fps=$2,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" output.gif
 
rm palette.png
 
convert -layers Optimize output.gif $1.gif
rm output.gif