HowtoMatrix

MPlayer is a pretty powerful tool for processing video files. It has a built-in command line option that will export specified movie frames to a GIF. Such a feature seems like it would make the guide I’m presenting here obsolete, but the problem with the feature is that the resultant GIF looks terrible: too few colors. As far as I’ve seen, the best way to get good quality animated GIFs using only free software involves using a combination of MPlayer’s command line tools and a little bit of elbow grease in The GIMP. We will export the desired segment of video to a series of JPEG files, then use The GIMP to combine those files into a nicely animating GIF that should look nearly as good as the original video. I believe that it is possible to get MPlayer and The GIMP together in a script that will allow the end user to simply point the script to the desired movie file and the desired segment and the script will do all the “dirty work” and create the GIF. This is my end goal, but I have not taken the time necessary to learn any of GIMP’s scripting language. If there is a pre-existing solution that allows one to do what I am trying to show here, I’d love to know about it, so please let me know.

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