gettweetgif_algorithm.txt

How To Get A GIF From A Tweet

Twitter converts uploaded .gif files to a video for ease of use.  However,
you may want to get this .gif file.  As far as I know it's
not possible to download the raw .gif file, if any, that Twitter stores.
However, it is possible to download the video file using curl and
convert it to a gif using ffmpeg (though making a high quality .gif
may require some knowledge of ffmpeg's arcane parameters).

Instructions:

- download the HTML source code of the tweet containing the GIF
  (note: view source doesn't work for this, because it won't contain the
  thumb URL used in the next step)
    curl https://twitter.com/<USER_HANDLE>/status/<TWEET_ID> > tweet.html

- in the source code, find a URL containing "tweet_video_thumb", e.g:
    https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video_thumb/<VIDEO_ID>.jpg
  (note: the video ID will be different from the tweet ID)

- this URL will end in <VIDEO_ID>.jpg (excluding brackets)

- using this ID, the video url is (also excluding brackets):
    https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/<VIDEO_ID>.mp4

- get that file, e.g.:
    curl https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/<VIDEO_ID>.mp4 > video.mp4

- convert to gif:
  ffmpeg -i video.mp4 output.gif

- the gif will be of low quality.  With ffmpeg wizardry it's possible to generate
  a higher quality one.  Some arcane parameters for doing that are described
  here, but I haven't tried them out yet:
    https://superuser.com/questions/556029/how-do-i-convert-a-video-to-gif-using-ffmpeg-with-reasonable-quality
- And here:
    https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-ffmpeg/