Is there a free way to convert mpg to gif?

[TomBrooklyn]

Hi,

Is there a way to convert a short mpg video to a gif, make it smaller and control how often it starts moving? I have something I want to use as an internet forum avatar. Preferably I'd like to do this with freeware.

I don't know if this is the right forum to ask this. I hope so. I also don't know which version of mpg I got. How do I tell that?

Thanks,
TomBk

[foxyshadis]

Gif Movie Gear (shareware) can import an avi, and it's simple to make a short avi from an mpeg. Imagemagick command line tools can do something similar (they may require individual frames, not sure) but in a rather user-unfriendly way. That's the limit of my experience.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

If by short you mean something around 50 frames or less, you could first use TMPGEnc to convert the MPEG to a series of .BMPs - and then use a GIF editor/animator called "Movies13". You can get it at:

http://jansfreeware.com/movies13.exe

[TomBrooklyn]

Hi,
I'm not sure how many frames it is. It is 9 seconds long in total but the time there is any movement is only about 3 seconds. It is a 745kb but it is quite tall and wide and i want to shrink it to avatar size.

[Mug Funky]

mplayer i think has an option to use gif89a as an output device (instead of showing it on the screen).

it uses a standard pallette though, and no particular dither, so quality will be suboptimal. good for quick stuff.