LICEcap can record the screen to LCF which can then be converted to animated GIFs, the hard way.

It was some time ago when I first saw how Jon Skinner had created some really nice looking and sleek simple screencast on the Sublime Text page as introduction to the magnificent editor, I loved it. I contacted Jon, whom kindly shared with me the Python and Javascript code he had used to create it. He told me not to write anything until he had published about it, and I promised not to. It was months before he decided to write a blog post about it, which he called Animated GIFs the Hard Way

Animated GIFs are limited in the sense they can only be 256 colors, but with Jon's method all that was missing was a simpler way for recording the screen. He provided the capture.py script, but it captured the whole screen and at constant intervals of time, still it was very handy.

Recently I found out about LICEcap, a pretty neat and useful tool to capture an area of the screen and save it directly to .GIF, but also to its own native lossless proprietary file format: .LCF. The proprietary format keeps the recorded screencast compressed in full color, I just needed a way to extract those and use Jon's anim_encoder to package those to a single PNG file and its corresponding Javascript so I started a fork of Jon's anim_encoder and went about adding LCF file format support to it.

My GitHub fork contains the .LCF reader and processor and accepts LICEcap LCF files to produce the packaged files. The following is an example produced by running ./anim_encoder.py example.lcf: