OS X Screencast to animated GIF

README.md

Screen Capture with Quicktime/FFmpeg/gifsicle

This gist explains how I created the following screencapture as an animated gif:

Instructions

The above gif was created as follows:

• Open "Quicktime Player",
• Go to File -> New Screen Recording
• Selected screen portion by dragging a rectangle, recorded 13 second video.
• Saved the video in full quality named in.mov (filesize: 19 megabytes)
• Ran the following command that produced out.gif (filesize: 48 kilabytes)
  • ffmpeg -i in.mov -s 600x400 -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 10 -f gif - | gifsicle -O3 -d3 > out.gif
  • "-r 10" refers to 10 frames per second
  • "-s 600x400" specifies max-width and max-height

Installation

brew install ffmpeg imagemagick 
brew-cask install x-quartz #dependency for gifsicle, required for mountain-lion and above
open /usr/local/Cellar/xquartz/2.7.4/XQuartz.pkg # run the installer
brew install gifsicle

Resources:

• http://schneems.com/post/41104255619/use-gifs-in-your-pull-request-for-good-not-evil
• http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/16zu7d/use_gifs_in_your_pull_requests_for_good_not_evil/
• http://superuser.com/questions/436056/how-can-i-get-ffmpeg-to-convert-a-mov-to-a-gif#_=_
• http://gnuski.blogspot.ca/2012/06/creating-animate-gif-with-free-software.html