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console2svg

Convert to video formats

You can directly convert captured SVG animations to common video formats such as GIF and MP4 when outputting them.

Output examples

Section titled “Output examples”

Specify the desired extension with the -o option (or use --format). If ffmpeg is installed on the system, encoding runs automatically.

GIF animation

Section titled “GIF animation”
Terminal
console2svg capture -v -o demo.gif -- cmatrix -ab

cmatrix -ab

MP4 video

Section titled “MP4 video”
Terminal
console2svg capture -v -o demo.mp4 -- cmatrix -ab

WebM video

Section titled “WebM video”
Terminal
console2svg capture -v -o demo.webm -- cmatrix -ab

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

Animated SVGs cannot be converted directly to various video formats as-is. Therefore, conversion roughly follows the steps below.

  1. Extract the generated animation as one SVG per frame with save-frames.

  2. If direct conversion from svg is possible (when librsvg is enabled), simply concatenate all SVGs and pass them to ffmpeg.

  3. If direct conversion from svg is not possible, first convert them to PNG images with resvg, then pass them to ffmpeg.

This makes conversion to video formats possible in many different environments.