A small freedom area. High quality GIF with FFmpeg Mon 16 Mar 2015 fun , gif , ffmpeg , av About two years ago, I tried to improve the support of the GIF encoding in FFmpeg to make it at least decent. This notably led to the addition of the transparency mechanism in the GIF encoder. While this is not always optimal depending on your source, it is in the most common cases. Still, this was merely an attempt to prevent shaming the encoder too much. But recently at Stupeflix , we needed a way to generate high quality GIF for the Legend app , so I decided to work on this again. All the features presented in this blog post are available in FFmpeg 2.6 , and will be used in the next version of Legend app (probably around March 26th). TL;DR : go to the Usage section to see how to use it. Let's observe the effect of the transparency mechanism introduced in 2013 in the GIF encoder: % ...