Totally agree, although the author's use of vlc definitely qualifies as a clever hack.

I want more hackers to realize how insanely easy it is to programmatically generate video with ffmpeg. Just write a program that dumps raw RGB frames to stdout! You can turn that into any video format conceivable, including gif.

Here's a little demo I wrote. Generates a video of the Mandelbrot set coming into focus:

https://github.com/acg/generating-video-demo

Example gif:

http://imgur.com/RiqEHJJ