Is there a screen recording app that saves as .gif?

Question

I have a blog, and sometimes I'd like to show my readers something specific about computers.

I've seen a lot of screen recording software, but all seem to save as video files.

Do any save as an animated GIF? I know how to transform a small video into a .gif, but I believe that I could make a smaller file if the .gif was created directly.

I'd like to be able to make something like this (from Codinghorror's "Invisible Formatting Tags are Evil"):

alt text

for Linux/POSIX: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/35404/14305 — Janus Troelsen, Nov 08 '12 at 19:20
My 7 years old question is marked as duplicate of a 6 years old question :D — Manu, Aug 25 '16 at 20:32
@Manu If it's any consolation, I've just upvoted you for being first. Thanks to Janus for the Unix link. — Anthony Geoghegan, Nov 08 '16 at 11:45

score 14 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 07 '19 at 16:08

Camtasia. If you scroll down, in the comments Jeff says:

Please, tell what tool you did use to make that kind of gif-based animated demo ?

In this case, it's Camtasia, but I've used gif-gif-gif before for similar effects. Check out the Donation Coder roundup of screencasting tools for more options:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/ScreenCasting/

Jeff Atwood on May 9, 2006 9:02 AM

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '13 at 11:08

7

To capture screen shots I find Cropper is very good (and it is free). Animated GIF support is available in the Cropper Plugins.

answered Feb 14 '13 at 11:08

Robert MacLean

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Works fine on Windows 7. Only downside is it won't record the mouse cursor. – That Brazilian Guy Oct 03 '13 at 23:52
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@ThatBrazilianGuy: you can activate mouse cursor capturing in options: http://j.mp/19t37BM – Răzvan Flavius Panda Nov 16 '13 at 15:52
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Cropper doesn't have a very smooth user experience. The area selection window gets in the way during capture. If you hide that you have trouble starting and stopping capture. It crashes sometimes. Etc etc. – fret Jul 08 '14 at 00:28
Same experience -- it captures it's own window for the first few seconds until you hide it (and at the end again until you unhide it). – BrainSlugs83 Aug 25 '14 at 04:51
I ended up writing "Gifferly" for all my gif capture needs ;-) – fret Sep 09 '14 at 06:59

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 14 '13 at 11:45

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When I have done this in the past, I always would do it in a two stage process. The easiest way to do this is use an application that records the video you want to convert into a GIF and then the second part of the process is to convert the video into a GIF image.

There are good desktop/screen capture utils however I recommend either Capture Fox

Animake will convert an mpg video into a GIF file.

edited Feb 14 '13 at 11:45

Robert MacLean

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answered Aug 09 '09 at 21:55

Axxmasterr

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Capture Fox ceased development (stuck at Firefox 6). Anyway, was it capable of recording the screen outside of Firefox? – Dan Dascalescu Mar 09 '14 at 12:30

Is there a screen recording app that saves as .gif?

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