Loop MP4 From Converted Animated Gif

conversiongifvideo

How do I convert animated gifs to mp4s that loop?

This command successfully converts the gifs to mp4s, but the loop doesn't appear to work:

for i in *.gif; do ffmpeg -f gif -i "$i" -loop 0 "0output$i.mp4"; done

When I play the resulting mp4s in SMPlayer it will only loop if I set SMPlayer to repeat, but then SMplayer has a jitter between repeats so it doesn't repeat smoothly.

Best Answer

You can make a looping GIF by setting a bit in the header of the file (been doing that since 1989), but there is no such facility that I know of in the .mp4 files. For them looping is controlled via an additional, player dependent, file.

The absence of that also is the reason why you don't have any looping .mp4 on YouTube.

Related Solutions

How to do I convert an animated gif to an mp4 or mv4 on the command line

Here's what worked for me:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" video.mp4

movflags – This option optimizes the structure of the MP4 file so the browser can load it as quickly as possible.

pix_fmt – MP4 videos store pixels in different formats. We include this option to specify a specific format which has maximum compatibility across all browsers.

vf – MP4 videos using H.264 need to have a dimensions that are divisible by 2. This option ensures that’s the case.

Source: http://rigor.com/blog/2015/12/optimizing-animated-gifs-with-html5-video

GIF screencasting; the UNIX way

OK then

GIF vimcast!

I started ffcast, did vim, quit ffcast, then converted .avi→.gif.

I ran the recording commands in another terminal. Polished script for your $PATH at the end of this answer.

What happened?

Capturing

FFcast helps the user interactively select a screen region and hands over the geometry to an external command, such as FFmpeg, for screen recording.

ffcast is the glorious product of some hacking at the Arch Linux community (mainly lolilolicon). You can find it on github (or in the AUR for Archers). Its dependency list is just bash and ffmpeg, though you'll want xrectsel (AUR link) for interactive rectangle selection.

You can also append ffmpeg flags right after the command. I set -r 15 to capture at 15 frames per second and -codec:v huffyuv for lossless recording. (Play with these to tweak the size/quality tradeoff.)

GIFfing

ImageMagick can read .avi videos and has some GIF optimisation tricks that drastically reduce file size while preserving quality: The -layers Optimize to convert invokes the general-purpose optimiser. The ImageMagick manual has a page on advanced optimisations too.

Final script

This is what I have in my $PATH. It records into a temporary file before converting.

#!/bin/bash
TMP_AVI=$(mktemp /tmp/outXXXXXXXXXX.avi)
ffcast -s % ffmpeg -y -f x11grab -show_region 1 -framerate 15 \
    -video_size %s -i %D+%c -codec:v huffyuv                  \
    -vf crop="iw-mod(iw\\,2):ih-mod(ih\\,2)" $TMP_AVI         \
&& convert -set delay 10 -layers Optimize $TMP_AVI out.gif

Thanks to BenC for detective work in figuring out the correct flags after the recent ffcast update.

If you'd like to install the dependencies on a Debian-based distro, Louis has written helpful installation notes.

Wheeeeee!