giph

giph is a screen recorder that records the desktop, a window or selection and encodes it into a gif file. It prints the encoded gif directly to standard output when omitting the output filename.

I used giph to record a gif of giph recording a gif.

Examples

$ giph -s -l -c 1,1,1,0.3 -b 5 -p -5 out.gif 

Select a window or area with slop. The selection rectangle is highlighted in a transparent blue color abd has a 5px border on the inside. After stopping the recording with either ctrl+c, by running giph --stop or by sending a SIGINT to the processgroup, the resulting gif is written to out.gif.

$ giph -g 100x200+0+0 -d 5 -t 10

Records a 100x200 pixel rectangle in the top left corner of the screen. The recording starts after a 5 seconds countdown and will record for exactly 10 seconds. The resulting gif will be printed to standard output, which makes this able to be piped into other scripts like a file-upload to an image hosting service.

$ giph -f 30 -t 5 -s -a -m out.webm

Records a 5 second video of the users selection at 30 fps. The recording also contains the users desktop audio and microphone. If the recording fails because the default audio source 0 is not the correct one, run pacmd list-sources to get the correct source index or name and pass it to the -as parameter instead of using -a. Example: giph -f 30 -t 5 -s -as 1 -m out.webm (using id) or giph -f 30 -t 5 -s -as alsa_output.pci-0000_04_00.1.hdmi-stereo.monitor -m out.webm (using name)

$ giph -s -t 10 --format webm | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st | xclip -selection clipboard

Records a 10 second webm of the users selection, uploads the video to 0x0.st using curl and copies the returned url to the clipboard.

Installation

Arch

$ yay -S giph

Or install giph-git to get the latest development version.

From source

Make sure to install the following dependencies:

• ffmpeg
• xdotool

Optionally, install the following dependencies:

• slop (--select)
• libnotify (--notify)
• pgrep (--stop)

Clone the giph repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/phisch/giph.git

And finally install giph:

$ cd giph
$ sudo make install

Desktop Makers

I am actively working on giph and other cool projects on the Desktop Makers Discord. It aims to be a community for communities of Linux desktop related projects. If you are looking to collaborate with or want to contribute to great projects, this might be the right place for you.