I’ve seen a couple of ‘how to’ posts popping up for the lucky Mac users, but I’ve only got a little eeePC running Ubuntu, so I had to take a different approach. For anyone else that’s in the same boat, here’s how I went about it…

1.  install XVidCap from your favourite repository (or direct from http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/)
2.  crank it up and set the capture region on the screen
3.  right click on the capture file name and open the preferences screen
4.  click on the ‘multi frame’ tab and enter a directory and file name for your capture file
5.  find a video (I used a Nosferatu trailer on YouTube)
6.  cue the onscreen video to a likely start point and pause
7.  start XVidCap recording, unpause the video, record your section and then stop the XVidCap recording
8.  open a terminal and change to your video capture directory
9.  run ffmpeg to create a series of still images (you might need to apt-get ffmpeg to install it first) the command I used was: 
     ffmpegi nosferatu.avir 10s 378x338f image2 tmp-%01d.jpg 
   where nosferatu.avi is my captured video,r 10 creates 10 images per second of video (my capture rate) ands 378×338 was the video frame size (the size of the XVidCap widow set up in the second step)
10.  open the Gimp image editor (again, install if needed)
11.  on the file menu select ‘open as layers’ and select 3 sequential images
12.  use file, open as layers to select the middle image again
13.  select file, save as and save as a .gif file
14.  tell the Gimp to save as an animation, set the delay between frames to taste (mine’s 300ms)

and this is pretty much what you’ll see:

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