This guide covers the ins and outs of FFmpeg starting with fundamental concepts and moving to media transcoding and video and audio processing along with practical example.

If you’ve ever tried encoding GIFs with ffmpeg there’s a good chance your results came out looking pretty bad. This is because GIFs are limited to a palette of 256 colours and ffmpeg just uses a generic palette to be able to cover a wide range of colours.

gifgen produces much better results by doing a 2-pass encode. The first pass generates a custom colour palette based on all of the pixels from each frame. The second pass encodes the GIF using this palette instead of the default one bundled with ffmpeg.

Convert videos to animated GIFs (or WebP) using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a powerful tool for manipulating audiovisual files. Unfortunately, it also has a steep learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with a command line interface. This app helps users through the command generation process so that more people can reap the benefits of FFmpeg.