One of the great ironies of the last few years has been the explosion in popularity of the animated GIF. Just as browsers were finally starting to embrace cutting-edge technologies like WebRTC, WebSockets and WebGL, a technology first supported by Netscape 2.0 in 1995 completely took over cultural landscape on internet. You can’t read a sports blog, a tweet or even go to a technology conference without running into the humble animated GIF.
Despite the popularity of animated GIFs, the tools for making them aren’t great. Personally, I wanted something simple that I could use to convert cute videos of my kids on my phone into animated GIFs. Now, there are several tools for converting videos to animated GIFs on your computer. Recently some developers from Yahoo released Gifshot, a tool that converts videos into animated GIFs inside of your browser using open web technologies. But I wanted to build a web service, so I needed to rely on software that was either built-in to or could be easily added to a standard Linux server distro. After some trial and error, I landed on the following combination of technologies:
- Ubuntu 14.04 on a Digital Ocean VPS
- Libav – to process the videos and retrieve the frames
- Imagemagick – to stitch together the animated GIF
- Node.js – to orchestrate and serve the generated animated GIFs
- Twilio – to send and receive MMS messages
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