Step 1: Create a Digital Ocean DropletĬreate a Digital Ocean account and get a free $10 credit with the code twilio10. If you already have an Ubuntu VPS with Node.js installed you can skip ahead to Step 2. Ubuntu Linux server with Node.js installedįor the purposes of this blog post I’m going to use a Digital Ocean droplet to power this service.Twilio account with an MMS-enabled phone number.Here are the two things you’ll need to get started: This is what you will accomplish when you’re done: In this blog post we’ll walk through the process of building this app from scratch by spinning up a Linux VPS, installing the necessary software on it, building a simple Node application to orchestrate the conversion of videos to animated GIFs and wiring it into a Twilio number. You can try out a hosted version of the app I built by sending a short video (think Vine, 6 seconds or less) to:Īfter being notified that your video has been queued, you should receive an animated GIF version of your video. Twilio – to send and receive MMS messages.Node.js – to orchestrate and serve the generated animated GIFs.Imagemagick – to stitch together the animated GIF.Libav – to process the videos and retrieve the frames.After some trial and error, I landed on the following combination of technologies: But I wanted to build a web service, so I needed to rely on software that was either built-in to or could be easily added to a standard Linux server distro. Recently some developers from Yahoo released Gifshot, a tool that converts videos into animated GIFs inside of your browser using open web technologies. Now, there are several tools for converting videos to animated GIFs on your computer. Personally, I wanted something simple that I could use to convert cute videos of my kids on my phone into animated GIFs. You can’t read a sports blog, a tweet or even go to a technology conference without running into the humble animated GIF.ĭespite the popularity of animated GIFs, the tools for making them aren’t great. Just as browsers were finally starting to embrace cutting-edge technologies like WebRTC, WebSockets and WebGL, a technology first supported by Netscape 2.0 in 1995 completely took over cultural landscape on internet. One of the great ironies of the last few years has been the explosion in popularity of the animated GIF.
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