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

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

Manu

Posted 2009-08-09T21:47:51.493

Reputation: 2 764

My 7 years old question is marked as duplicate of a 6 years old question :D – Manu – 2016-08-25T20:32:10.390

1@Manu If it's any consolation, I've just upvoted you for being first. Thanks to Janus for the Unix link. – Anthony Geoghegan – 2016-11-08T11:45:29.083

for Linux/POSIX: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/35404/14305

– Janus Troelsen – 2012-11-08T19:20:43.317

Answers

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

hyperslug

Posted 2009-08-09T21:47:51.493

Reputation: 12 882

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

Robert MacLean

Posted 2009-08-09T21:47:51.493

Reputation: 1 641

1Cropper 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 – 2014-07-08T00:28:16.350

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 – 2014-08-25T04:51:14.277

I ended up writing "Gifferly" for all my gif capture needs ;-) – fret – 2014-09-09T06:59:54.903

Works fine on Windows 7. Only downside is it won't record the mouse cursor. – That Brazilian Guy – 2013-10-03T23:52:32.537

@ThatBrazilianGuy: you can activate mouse cursor capturing in options: http://j.mp/19t37BM

– Răzvan Flavius Panda – 2013-11-16T15:52:34.480

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.

Axxmasterr

Posted 2009-08-09T21:47:51.493

Reputation: 7 584

Capture Fox ceased development (stuck at Firefox 6). Anyway, was it capable of recording the screen outside of Firefox? – Dan Dascalescu – 2014-03-09T12:30:29.490