mov2gif—How to create animated gifs from QuickTime screen recording

Everybody loves animated GIFs. But what’s even better is the ability to turn your screencast into one. I’m pretty sure that when working with GitHub, you use pull-requests very often. The ability to quickly attach an image when showing what’s included is very useful. But what if you could also include a short video showing how it works in action?

mov2gif

mov2gif is a simple script that uses two command line tools to convert a QuickTime movie into a gif. You will need ffmpeg and imagemagick.

$ brew install ffmpeg
$ brew install imagemagick

Now let’s record a screencast. In QuickTime you pick the New Screen Recording option:

Next we simply record our screen.

After saving the file as MOV, we can convert it with our script:

$ ~/bin/mov2gif.rb ~/Documents/Changing\ Branches.mov ~/Documents/branches.gif
Processing: /Users/piotr/Documents/Changing Branches.mov -> /Users/piotr/Documents/branches.gif, {:fps=>15, :loop=>true}
Executing ffmpeg -loglevel quiet -i /Users/piotr/Documents/Changing Branches.mov -r 15 /var/folders/y3/73m4d5gs6xdbyjrxkmkwcj9r0000gn/T/mov2gif.rb20131121-83782-1761a1l/%5d.png
Executing convert -loop 0 -delay 1x15 /var/folders/y3/73m4d5gs6xdbyjrxkmkwcj9r0000gn/T/mov2gif.rb20131121-83782-1761a1l/*.png /Users/piotr/Documents/branches.gif

And that’s it. We can simply drag and drop our newly created gif into the pull-request comment form!

The script can be downloaded on GitHub Gist.

Other similar scripts:

• mov2gif.py

Last modified: 06-Feb-24