

OS X Screencast to animated GIF - gabamnml
https://gist.github.com/dergachev/4627207

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juandazapata
Or just use the free tool LICECAP
([http://www.cockos.com/licecap/](http://www.cockos.com/licecap/)), record
directly from the screen, export to GIF and avoid all that hassle.

However, I can see why this could be a cool learning experiment.

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courtewing
If you can get beyond the ancient website design, this is actually an
amazingly simple tool. It is trivial to record a small portion of your screen,
and it saves directly to your desktop as a gif. No file saving, exporting,
etc. At Engine Yard, we use these gifs for UI related pull requests, bug
requests, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that.

~~~
petercooper
I use LICEcap a lot too, it's really cool. The only downside is the file sizes
can quickly become gigantic compared to MP4. I wonder if imgur's new
conversion feature could be useful here though if they're uploaded there..

~~~
manachar
That's not because of LICEcap, that's because of the nature of gifs. Gifs are
a horrible format for longform motion. All Imgur or gyfcat do is convert it
from a gif to a mp4.

If you're worried about size, just use the mp4.

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dergachev
Oh cool this is my old gif gist. I ended up writing a ruby wrapper around it
these open source tools, check it out at
[https://github.com/dergachev/screengif](https://github.com/dergachev/screengif)

~~~
manto
Thanks for making this. Have you tried to use lossygif
[https://pornel.net/lossygif](https://pornel.net/lossygif) (which is based on
gifsicle)? We've seen a consistent 20% reduction in file size.

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jameshawkins
I highly recommend CloudApp. Hosts screenshots and gifs, auto posts URLs to
screenshots to your clipboard.
[http://www.getcloudapp.com/](http://www.getcloudapp.com/)

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reubenmorais
Please mind the accessibility loss when doing something like this in a pull
request or, even more importantly, in documentation. Include a text
description that's good enough for anyone to grasp what's going on without
looking at the GIF. Your vision impaired contributors will thank you. It'll
also be friendlier to people who watch repos via email.

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proksoup
licecap is an application that allows direct screen recording to gif.

I personally find it more useful than this OP project, and so wanted to share
in case others also find it useful.

~~~
sync
[http://www.cockos.com/licecap/](http://www.cockos.com/licecap/)

Works super great!

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m_mueller
I think Sublime's animated image encoder would be a great tool if someone took
over support for it. Both compression and quality should be miles ahead of any
gif converter, I just think it's a bit too much of a hassle to use.

[https://github.com/sublimehq/anim_encoder](https://github.com/sublimehq/anim_encoder)

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colanderman
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't a screencast supposed to be live? Like a
broadcast?

Anyway I bet an actual live broadcast wouldn't be too hard to do, although
your poor viewers' browser caches would fill up pretty easy. But then that's
what multipart/x-mixed-replace is for.

~~~
protomyth
a lot of Screencasts were Podcasts so live is not required.

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mejackreed
There's this gem that simplifies the steps needed.
[https://github.com/jkeck/make-me-a-gif](https://github.com/jkeck/make-me-a-
gif) . Full disclosure my awesome coworker made it.

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Aissen
Yeah, let's all collectively waste more bandwidth because browsers couldn't
agree on a common video codec… At least gfycat and imgur's gifv are try to
solve this problem.

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swhitt
Now we just need ShareX for OS X (and have it deal with the damn hidpi
screenshots correctly).

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Thev00d00
Amazing people are still doing this in this age of HTML5 video.

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joelrunyon
I like recordit.co

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tshadwell
byzanz was created for this purpose.

