From DVD to animated gif, in under three steps.

January 13, 2010 8:43 PM

One-step conversion of a movie clip to an animated gif. Possible (and easy) on a Mac?

I'm hoping to reduce the following workflow to the shortest number of steps:

1. Watch a DVD with VLC.
2 Capture a clip from the DVD with Snapz Pro
3. Convert the clip to an animated gif.

I have access to Photoshop CS4 and Fireworks to do this the long way, but I'd prefer not to use them, and just get these animated GIFs in as few steps as possible, while opening as few programs as possible. Terminal / Automator / Quicksilver-y solutions would be awesome.

Some stuff I've tried:
using terminal / ffmpeg -- animated GIFs are heavily dithered
using terminal / mplayer -- ideal as it looks like this could be a one-step solution, but mplayer won't compile
using terminal / ffmpeg, making a batch of jpegs, then use imagemagick -- seems possible, but can't find anything that'll let me bring in a group of images without typing out the name of each jpeg in the command

This is for a serious, work-related thing! Not for ONTD posts. So any help is appreciated and sorely needed. Thanks in advance.

posted by miniminimarket to computers & internet (4 answers total)

If you don't mind filtering through YouTube, Gickr will do this if other avenues don't look promising.
posted by jessamyn at 9:03 PM on January 13, 2010

For grouping images without specifying them all at the command line: put them in the directory gif/ and then the shell glob gif/* will indicate all the images. You just need to name them so they are sorted by the glob in order. ffmpeg does this by default. For making the animation, I will recommend what I just recommended to that other guy: gifsickle (command line animated gif creator). It is a command line program for making or breaking animated gifs.

Also: gifsickle has the funniest home page of any app I have seen in ages.
posted by idiopath at 9:15 PM on January 13, 2010

you could try converting one using http://www.media-convert.com/.

Not sure about quality/dithering however, don't think it has any advanced options
posted by derbs at 5:27 AM on January 14, 2010

You should be able to install mplayer via MacPorts or grab Mplayer OSX Extended.
posted by jeffkramer at 8:55 AM on January 14, 2010