FFmpeg: high quality animated GIF?

Question

I'm generating animated a GIF from a video on my server.

The generated GIF is not really high quality and it looks like the pixels are huge.

Example:

This is how I generate the GIF:

shell_exec("/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vf scale=500:-1 -t 10 -r 10 image.gif"); 

I did a search on Google and came across this:

shell_exec("/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i video.mkv -r 20 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm - | convert -delay 5 - output.gif"); 

But the command above doesn't do anything and no output.gif is being generated at all.

There are some tutorials that I came across but none of them worked for me and some of them involve using ImageMagick which I dont have access to.

Could someone please let me know if there is a clear way to generate a high-quality GIF using FFmpeg?

Answer 1

I've written a tool specifically for maximum quality:

https://gif.ski

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 frame%04d.png gifski -o clip.gif frame*.png 

It generates good per-frame palettes, but also combines palettes across frames, achieving even thousands of colors per frame.

If you want to reduce the video dimensions, add a scaling filter:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf scale=400:240 frame%04d.png 

If you want to reduce the frame rate, add the fps filter:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf fps=12 frame%04d.png 

You can combine the filters with -vf scale=400:240,fps=12

Answer 2

The key issue is that any gif picture or frame has an extremely limited palette of only 256 of the possible millions of colors in your video.

This is well explained here.

So, fairly recently (2015, version 2.6) ffmpeg got the palettegen and paletteuse filters that can generate better pallettes for each frame.

Therefore, make sure you are using a fairly recent version of ffmpeg.

So, there's your secret and key search term to get you to make high quality gifs in no time - study up on palettegen filters. Reddit beware.

Some references:

ffmpeg 2.6 release notes

ffmpeg docs

superuser

blog.phk.me