Fastest way to create animated gifs from mp4

For first you should create a set of jpg images with maximum quality using mplayer and jpeg option sets to 100 (jpeg:quality=100).

mplayer -ao null -ss 0:00:00 -endpos 10 mts.flv -vo jpeg:outdir=jpeg_dir:quality=100

Next, you need to convert generated jpgs to gifs using convert, just type:

for i in ./jpeg_dir/*.jpg; do convert "$i" "${i%.jpg}.gif"; done

And finally using gifsicle create animated gif:

gifsicle --delay=10 --loop ./jpeg_dir/*.gif > anim.gif

Also, you can use optimization level flag --optimize=03. It can be helpful to reduce file size:

gifsicle --delay=10 --optimize=03 --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Additionally, you can manipulate with number of colors --colors num of current palette and --color-method method to determine most appropriate palette.

As for me most appropriate method is median-cut

median-cut is the median cut algorithm described by Heckbert

Also, I try to manipulate with described flags and found most useful options to achievebetter quality of generated gif-image:

gifsicle --delay=3 --optimize=03 --color-method median-cut --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Be accurate with --delay=NUM to correspond animation speed . This param depends on FPS of original video.

It could improve passing from uncompressed images, like .ppm, for example with mplayer the command line would be:

mplayer -benchmark -noframedrop -nosound -vf format=rgb24 -vo pnm *.avi -osdlevel 0

These will save the jpg compress/uncompress cycle.

It would also help working with a Solid State Drive.

Use "animate" program from imagemagick package after splitting video to images. Like thisanimate ./*.jpg. Then just save opened merged in ImageMagick program images as gif. But it may be large/ Then nеed to optimize and resize(better to do it with mplayer first scale=240:180).