I use FFmpeg and its filters.
These two filters were added by a year or so, while before It was a pain to achieve even a 5/10 score quality GIF image from a video.
However...
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#palettegen - GIF format is limited to 256 colors, so it needs to extract the main colors used in the video to make the gif.
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#paletteuse - It actually perform the operation of dithering to spread the colors over the image and build a GIF from the palette which has been given to it from palettegen.
EDITTo make it the simplest possible.
http://ffmpeg.org/download.html - Download for Linux, Mac and Windows
It's a command line tool, so open your terminal, set your current directory where you just download the zipped file ( that you have to unzip ) and finally open the
bin folder ( it has to be there... ).
In the bin folder you'll find:
ffmpeg,
ffprobe and
ffplay. What you are going to use is
ffmpeg.
In the terminal paste these commands ( these are only examples and may vary ):
1st: - Code: Select all
ffmpeg -i VIDEO -vf palettegen -y PALETTE.png
2nd: - Code: Select all
ffmpeg -i VIDEO -i PALETTE -lavfi paletteuse -y OUTPUT.gif
These are some results: