OS X Screencast to animated GIF | Hacker News Reader

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

gist.github.com

94 pointsgabamnml20 comments

Or just use the free tool 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.

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.

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..

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.

Yeah, LICECAP is great. I have taken to using it for providing UI/UX feedback on Design. Just make the GIF, drag into github discussion for the issue or Pull Request. Done. :) It removes a lot of hassle of reproducing the errors for designers from verbal or written instructions. Keycastr is also a good addition to the set of tools, as it can show the exact commands you were entering too.

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

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

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

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.

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.

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Works super great!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I like recordit.co

byzanz was created for this purpose.

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