The command I use to record the video, for example to record 15 seconds of video at 25 fps, sized 830x150 pixels at offset from the top of x=230,y=360 is:
avconv -f x11grab -y -r 25 -s 830x150 -i :0.0+230,360 -vcodec libx264 -crf 0 -threads 4 -t 15 myvideo.mp4
For a while I was using a one-liner to convert the video to animated gifs using ffmpeg and ImageMagick's convert command based on this post. Below it samples the mp4 at 15 fps.
ffmpeg -i myvideo.mp4 -r 15 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm - | convert -delay 7 -loop 0 - gif:- | convert -layers Optimize - myvideo.gif
The problem I ran into was the the color palette choice in the gifs was poor and creating weird artifacts.
So I came across http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html, which layed out another strategy, resulting in the following two commands:
ffmpeg -v warning -i myvideo.mp4 -vf "fps=25,palettegen" -y /tmp/pallette.png ffmpeg -v warning -i myvideo.mp4 -i /tmp/pallette.png -lavfi "fps=25 [x]; [x][1:v] paletteuse" -y myvideo.gif or, if you don't need to change the frame rate: ffmpeg -v warning -i myvideo.mp4 -vf "palettegen" -y /tmp/pallette.png ffmpeg -v warning -i myvideo.mp4 -i /tmp/pallette.png -lavfi paletteuse -y myvideo.gif
I found this approach much better. The color artifacts were gone and also the file sizes were much smaller! It chopped about 50-80% off of the file size compared to the previous ffmpeg/convert pipeline.
