Make an Animated GIF Screen Recording

First off, try byzanz to make an animated GIF screen recording on Linux. When it works, it is the easiest way. However, I had trouble with it recording a single window on my system, so I instead put together a solution by taking screen shots, converting them to GIFs with mogrify, and combining those into an animated GIF using gifenc.

Step 1: Screen Shots

Use Alt-Print Screen to capture screen shots as your application runs. Gnome conveniently names them with numbers at the end so they are in sequence.

Step 2: Convert with Mogrify

Use mogrify to convert all of the PNGs to GIFs:

mogrify -colors 200 -format gif Screenshot-*.png

You'll have a bunch of GIF files corresponding to the PNGs.

Step 3: Create the Animated GIF with gifenc

First, create a file with a list of all of the GIFs:

find -name *.gif > gif-list.txt

Use gifenc to convert the GIFs to a single animated GIF:

java -classpath ../lib/classes.jar net.jmge.gif.Gif89Encoder gif-list.txt

The file gif89out.gif has your animated gif movie. Rename and then post on your website or send in email.

Last modified on July 3, 2008 by AO