Programming and technology blog

If you are adding GIFs on your GitHub pages (e.g. README.md), and are getting hit with the " Content length exceeded " message when accessing the said GIFs, it means that your GIFs are too big (more than 5 MB). Even if the GIFs were initially uploaded to a third site (e.g. blogspot.com, or giphy.com), they are eventually copied to GitHub servers, and if your GIFs are too big (e.g. more than 5 MB), they will no be shown (only the dreaded error message will be seen). To solve this problem, you have two choices : Commit your big GIFs to your GitHub repository: you might have other problems eventually when pulling from your repository, since these big GIFs will also be pulled locally Resize your GIFs : go back to the drawing board, and play with your video editing/GIF making software (e.g. PicGIF Lite) by trimming some images, lowering the video resolution (# pixels wide and tall), or speeding up the video. The best solution and the one I opted is the second one ...

If you want to make a GIF from a video file on your Mac, and are looking for a free tool to do it, I recommend using PicGIF Lite (free version). You can load video file or a list of images. Don't make your GIFs too long (more than 5 seconds) or your GIF file could be too big (10 MB and more). Sample gif built from sequence of images in the SBMnet dataset As a side note , you can trim your MPEG-4 videos with Quicktime using the CMD+T command. If you are having difficulty with Quicktime reading your video file format (e.g. avi movie files), the OpenShot video editor will surely open your video file (it is based on the FFmpeg library), and let you trim it among many other things. Reference: check this  macworld's How-to article  for other GIF-making tools that allow you for example to create GIFs from Youtube or Vimeo videos, or from recording your screen.