webm is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project WebP for images. On Fedora system, you could use the Gnome’s embedded screencast tool to create a 30 seconds video of your screen by default. What I want is a gif animation that would be easier to be transferred and shown online.

So how to convert webm file to gif file on Linux?

The best way is using ffmpeg 1.

ffmpeg -y -i input.webm -vf palettegen palette.png
ffmpeg -y -i input.webm -i palette.png -filter_complex paletteuse -r 10 output.gif

After that I also recommend using GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to crop off the unwanted part in the animation, it is also a way to reduce the animation size.

  1. How to do I convert an webm (video) to a (animated) gif on the command line? ↩