How to set better gif quality?

[gornostal]

Peek is awesome 👍
Exactly what I need from a screen recorder in terms of features and UX.
However I wish GIF quality could be better.

Is that possible to do at all?
If so, what part of the code should be tweaked to make gifs less pixelated?

I'm using Fedora 26 with GNOME Shell 3.24.3
Installed as it was instructed here

[phw]

It is hard to say what you mean with "better quality" and "less pixelated", can you provide an example.

In general you should be aware that the GIF format is limited to 256 colors. So if you record something with many colors you will get color distortions and dithering. In general ImageMagick does a decent job at getting a good color palette, but it can't do magic ;)

Having said this it could be possible to tweak this in Peek by calling imagemagick with maybe different dithering algorithms to improve results (but this quickly depends on the type of content you captured).

For some background see

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt/#color_problem

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/#colors

[gornostal]

Hi,
Here are two gifs. The first one was created using shell script that converts video to gif (see below), the second using Peek.
Notice the pixelated background gradient on the input box in second gif.

I'm not familiar with ffmpeg and I find Its CLI complicated. I would prefer using software like Peek for creating gifs.

I wonder if you can tell why the first gif turned out to be better quality by looking at the script?

#!/bin/sh

palette="/tmp/palette.png"
filters="fps=15"
ffmpeg -v warning -i $1 -vf "$filters,palettegen" -y $palette
ffmpeg -v warning -i $1 -i $palette -lavfi "$filters [x]; [x][1:v] paletteuse" -y $2

[NolanSyKinsley]

Will Peek ever have gifv, or rather mp4 comparability for high quality uploads?

[phw]

@NolanSkyKinsley GIFV is pretty much just a fancy marketing term for using MP4 in place of animated GIFs :)

Peek already supports recording MP4 (and WebM), you can choose the output format in the settings.

[phw]

Just to comment on the two GIFs you posted: The second one uses dithering to create the color gradient, which produces those single pixels, while the first one uses distinct color areas, which is why you see those clear lines of color (as GIF just does not allow for enough colors to make it really smooth).

Personally I think the second image gives a better overall quality of the image when viewed. I really have to look really closely to realize the colors are dithered, while I clearly see the colored lines in the first image without looking closely. But this is probably a) a matter of preference and b) it really depends on what you capture.

I can try making this an option, but it is rather low on my priority list.

[gornostal]

Thanks for the explanation @phw

[phw]

You might be interested in #212 and try the latest git release (see instructions in the ticket there).

TL;DR: I added support for the new gifski utility to generate the GIFs. File size is bigger, but quality is amazing.

[phw]

I consider this closed with the inclusion of the excellent gifski tool. See #212 for details, but the bottom line is that you have to use the latest git version and have the gifski tool installed, then you will have high quality encoding with configurable quality setting.

If you don't want to install from source you can also use the flatpak development release, it already includes gifski.

[gornostal]

Thanks @phw