requires "youtube-dl" -- sure you can do this with wget and some more obscurity but why waste your time when this great tool is available? the guts consist of mplayer converting a video to a gif -- study this command and read the man page for more information mplayer video.flv -ss 00:23 -endpos 6 -vo gif89a:fps=5:output=output.gif -vf scale=400:300 -nosound generates a 6 second gif starting at 23 seconds of play time at 5 fps and a scale of 400x300 start time (-ss)/end time (-endpos) formats: 00:00:00.000 end time should be relative to start time, not absolute. i.e. -endpos 5 == seconds after 0:42 = 0:47 end point play with fps and scale for lower gif sizes the subshell is a solution for the -b flag on youtube-dl which downloads the best quality video, sometimes, which can be various video formats $(ls ${url##*=}*| tail -n1) Show Sample Output

Creates a better looking gif than the original post via imagemagick processing high quality jpgs, rather than converting directly to gif from the video itself.

The 30 means start extracting frames from 30 seconds into the video. The 3 means extract the next 3 seconds from that point. The fps can be adjusted based on your preferences. The 320 is the width of the gif, the height will be calculated automatically. input.mp4 is the video file, which can be any video file ffmpeg supports. The output.gif is the gif created.