gifv is a shell script that converts videos and GIFs into video files optimized for GIF-like playback on the web.
Video files are superior to GIFs in filesize, playback control, and quality. There are a few online services that will convert GIFs to videos with GIF-like playback. Essentially, these "formats" are wrappers around compressed video files (h.264 encoded MP4s or WebMs), that occasionally include a GIF falback. These videos are often optimized further for GIF-like web consumption.
4chan began accepting WebMs as an alternative to GIFs in April 2014, so long as the videos contain only one video stream, no audio streams, are shorter than 120 seconds in duration, are less than 2048x2048 in dimension, and are less than 3 MB in size.
Two "competing formats", which appear to be very similar in implementation are GIFV and GFY – both pronounced "jiffy". GIFV was pioneered by imgur, while GFY was developed by gfycat.
DISCLAIMER: This tool is in no way related to imgur or gfycat.
Download the gifv script and make it available in your PATH.
curl -o /usr/local/bin/gifv -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joeyhoer/gifv/master/gifv.sh && \
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gifv
This script relies on ffmpeg:
brew install ffmpeg