How to create animated GIF images of a screencast?

screencast

I've seen animated GIF images of screen casts (like the one below) promoted a few times on this site as a way to improve answers.

Animated GIF image

What toolchain is being used to create these? Is there a program that does this automagically, or are people taking screencasts, converting them into a series of static frames, and then creating the GIF images?


Solution 1:

Peek

Is a new application that lets you easily record GIF's from your screen.

peek screencast demo

Anyway, keep in mind that GIF's have a very limited color palette so it's not a very good idea to use them.

Since Ubuntu 18.10 you can install Peek directly.

sudo apt install peek

For older versions of Ubuntu, you can install the latest versions of Peek from its PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install peek

Find more information in the GitHub repo.

Solution 2:

Byzanz

Best software I ever found to record GIF screencasts is Byzanz.

Byzanz is great because it records directly to GIF, the quality and FPS is impressive while maintaining the size of the files to a minimal.

Installation

Byzanz is now available from the universe repository:

sudo apt-get install byzanz

Usage

When it is installed you can run it in a terminal.

This is a small example I did just now with

byzanz-record --duration=15 --x=200 --y=300 --width=700 --height=400 out.gif

enter image description here

Solution 3:

First install this:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick mplayer gtk-recordmydesktop

those are the required stuff, ImageMagick, MPlayer and Desktop Recorder. Then use Desktop Recorder to capture a portion of the screen/application to use as the screencast. After the Desktop Recorder has saved the recording into an OGV video, MPlayer will be used to capture JPEG screenshots, saving them into the 'output' directory.

On a terminal:

mplayer -ao null <video file name> -vo jpeg:outdir=output

Use ImageMagick to convert the screenshots into an animated gifs.

convert output/* output.gif

you can optimize the screenshots this way:

convert output.gif -fuzz 10% -layers Optimize optimised.gif

Solution 4:

byzanz

Overview

This answer contains three shell scripts:

  1. byzanz-record-window - To select a window for recording.
  2. byzanz-record-region - To select a part of the screen for recording.
  3. A simple GUI front-end for 1.

Introduction

Thanks Bruno Pereira for introducing me to byzanz! It's quite useful for creating GIF animations. The colours may be off in some cases, but the file size makes up for it. Example: 40 seconds, 3.7Mb.

Usage

Save one/all of the following two scripts in a folder within your $PATH. Here's an example on using the first script to make a screencast of a specific window.

  1. Run byzanz-record-window 30 -c output.gif
  2. Go to the window (alt-tab) you want to capture. Click on it.
  3. Wait 10 seconds (hard-coded in $DELAY), in which you prepare for recording.
  4. After the beep (defined in the beep function), byzanz will start.
  5. After 30 seconds (that's the meaning of 30 in step 1), byzanz ends. A beep will be broadcast again.

I included the -c flag in byzanz-record-window to illustrate that any arguments to my shell script are appended to byzanz-record itself. The -c flag tells byzanz to also include the cursor in the screencast.
See man byzanz-record or byzanz-record --help for more details.

byzanz-record-window

#!/bin/bash

# Delay before starting
DELAY=10

# Sound notification to let one know when recording is about to start (and ends)
beep() {
    paplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE-Im-Irc-Event.ogg &
}

# Duration and output file
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    D="--duration=$@"
else
    echo Default recording duration 10s to /tmp/recorded.gif
    D="--duration=10 /tmp/recorded.gif"
fi
XWININFO=$(xwininfo)
read X <<< $(awk -F: '/Absolute upper-left X/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read Y <<< $(awk -F: '/Absolute upper-left Y/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read W <<< $(awk -F: '/Width/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read H <<< $(awk -F: '/Height/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")

echo Delaying $DELAY seconds. After that, byzanz will start
for (( i=$DELAY; i>0; --i )) ; do
    echo $i
    sleep 1
done

beep
byzanz-record --verbose --delay=0 --x=$X --y=$Y --width=$W --height=$H $D
beep

byzanz-record-region

Dependency: xrectsel from xrectsel. Clone the repository and run make to get the executable. (If it protests there is no makefile, run ./bootstrap and the ./configure before running `make). 

#!/bin/bash

# Delay before starting
DELAY=10

# Sound notification to let one know when recording is about to start (and ends)
beep() {
    paplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE-Im-Irc-Event.ogg &
}

# Duration and output file
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    D="--duration=$@"
else
    echo Default recording duration 10s to /tmp/recorded.gif
    D="--duration=10 /tmp/recorded.gif"
fi

# xrectsel from https://github.com/lolilolicon/xrectsel
ARGUMENTS=$(xrectsel "--x=%x --y=%y --width=%w --height=%h") || exit -1

echo Delaying $DELAY seconds. After that, byzanz will start
for (( i=$DELAY; i>0; --i )) ; do
    echo $i
    sleep 1
done
beep
byzanz-record --verbose --delay=0 ${ARGUMENTS} $D
beep

Gui version of byzanz-record-window

Script with a simple GUI dialogue:

#!/bin/bash

# AUTHOR:   (c) Rob W 2012, modified by MHC (https://askubuntu.com/users/81372/mhc)
# NAME:     GIFRecord 0.1
# DESCRIPTION:  A script to record GIF screencasts.
# LICENSE:  GNU GPL v3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)
# DEPENDENCIES:   byzanz,gdialog,notify-send (install via sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/byzanz; sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install byzanz gdialog notify-osd)

# Time and date
TIME=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S")

# Delay before starting
DELAY=10

# Standard screencast folder
FOLDER="$HOME/Pictures"

# Default recording duration
DEFDUR=10

# Sound notification to let one know when recording is about to start (and ends)
beep() {
    paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga &
}

# Custom recording duration as set by user
USERDUR=$(gdialog --title "Duration?" --inputbox "Please enter the screencast duration in seconds" 200 100 2>&1)

# Duration and output file
if [ $USERDUR -gt 0 ]; then
    D=$USERDUR
else
    D=$DEFDUR
fi

# Window geometry
XWININFO=$(xwininfo)
read X < <(awk -F: '/Absolute upper-left X/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read Y < <(awk -F: '/Absolute upper-left Y/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read W < <(awk -F: '/Width/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")
read H < <(awk -F: '/Height/{print $2}' <<< "$XWININFO")

# Notify the user of recording time and delay
notify-send "GIFRecorder" "Recording duration set to $D seconds. Recording will start in $DELAY seconds."

#Actual recording
sleep $DELAY
beep
byzanz-record -c --verbose --delay=0 --duration=$D --x=$X --y=$Y --width=$W --height=$H "$FOLDER/GIFrecord_$TIME.gif"
beep

# Notify the user of end of recording.
notify-send "GIFRecorder" "Screencast saved to $FOLDER/GIFrecord_$TIME.gif"

See also:

  • byzanz-gui by rhcarvalho
  • This other answer, another improved version of Rob W's byzanz-record-region.

Solution 5:

ffmpeg (install)

One of the best tools I use is ffmpeg. It can take most video from a screencast tool such as kazam and convert it to another format.

Install this from software-center - it is automatically installed if you install the excellent ubuntu-restricted-extras package.

Kazam can output in the video formats mp4 or webm. Generally you get better results outputting in mp4 format.

Example GIF making syntax

The basic syntax to convert video to gif is:

ffmpeg -i [inputvideo_filename] -pix_fmt rgb24 [output.gif]

GIFs converted - especially those with a standard 25/29 frame-per-second can be very large. For example - a 800Kb webm 15-second video at 25fps can output to 435 MB!

You can reduce this by a number of methods:

Framerate

Use the option -r [frame-per-second]. For example 

ffmpeg -i Untitled_Screencast.webm -r 1 -pix_fmt rgb24 out.gif

Size reduced from 435 MB to 19 MB

File-size limit

Use the option -fs [filesize]. For example 

ffmpeg -i Untitled_Screencast.webm -fs 5000k -pix_fmt rgb24 out.gif

Note: This is an approximate output file size so the size can be slightly bigger than specified.

Size of output video

Use the option -s [widthxheight]. For example 

ffmpeg -i Untitled_Screencast.webm -s 320x200 -pix_fmt rgb24 out.gif

This reduced the example 1366x768 video size down to 26 MB

Loop forever

Sometimes you might want the GIF to loop forever.

Use the option -loop_output 0. For example 

ffmpeg -i Untitled_Screencast.webm -loop_output 0 -pix_fmt rgb24 out.gif

Further optimise and shrink

If you use imagemagick convert with a fuzz factor between 3% and 10% then you can dramatically reduce the image size

convert output.gif -fuzz 3% -layers Optimize finalgif.gif

Finally

Combine some of these options to reduce to something manageable for Ask Ubuntu.

ffmpeg -i Untitled_Screencast.webm -loop_output 0 -r 5 -s 320x200 -pix_fmt rgb24 out.gif

Followed by

convert output.gif -fuzz 8% -layers Optimize finalgif.gif

Example

screencast example

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