I needed a quick way of converting videos to gifs on Linux -ffmpeg and this post on stackexchange to the rescue!

The result is this neat little bash script:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
 echo "Usage: videoToGif inputFile [outputFile] [FPS] [WIDTH]"
 echo "Example: videoToGif inputFile.ext outputFile.gif 60 360"
 exit 0
fi

inputFile=$1
outputFile=${2:-output.gif}

FPS=${3:-30}
WIDTH=${4:-360}

#Generate palette for better quality
ffmpeg -i $inputFile -vf fps=$FPS,scale=$WIDTH:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen tmp_palette.png

#Generate gif using palette
ffmpeg -i $inputFile -i tmp_palette.png -loop 0 -filter_complex "fps=$FPS,scale=$WIDTH:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" $outputFile

rm tmp_palette.png

I used it to convert a Screencast created with "recordMyDesktop" (from OGV format) to a GIF.