F = T ∇ Sτ

GIF format is still here, and it's a handy way to make small videos. It's very easy to do despite of all ads telling us to buy their commercial software, and I'm going to describe the tools we need. First, we need to capture the video of the screen. For Android, you can use  ADV Screen Recorder , but surely there are tools for any platform. Please verify the recorder settings (you may want to disable mic recording and change the output folder to be on an external SD). Second, after we recorded the video, we need to convert it into GIF-format. For that we're going to use FFMpeg tool (on Mac, just use "brew install ffmpeg"). GIF uses 256 colors, so we need to create an auxiliary palette file. Therefore, the converting process takes two steps: 1) create a palette, 2) use a palette and an input file to create the output GIF. The commands for that: $ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf fps=10,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png $ ffmpeg  -i input.mp4 -...

Linux is a power :-) I made sure of this again when trying to find a legal way to convert various video files in Windows OS to QuickTime format acceptable by iPod. Actually I do not use Windows, but iTunes is working only on it and MacOSX, so I didn't have a choice. But googling gave nothing, so I turned on Linux and easily found an appropriate way. The main magic of video processing in Linux is collected in FFmpeg solution. And it saved my life again. But before reading further please make sure that you will not violate any author rights and other license issues. Please examine the legal information on FFmpeg site. In most cases all video files you converted must by used only by you and can not be transferred to other users. The process of converting is very simple - just run ffmpeg with required options (of course, ffmpeg package and all auxiliary packages should be installed): $ ffmpeg -i /path/to/input_movie -f mov -sameq -s qvga /path/to/output_movie The main magic is...