Create high quality Steam gifs with gifski

26. July 2026

After several attempts to create good looking gifs for my game on Steam, I found Gifski. It is a great FOSS (AGPLv3) tool to create high quality and lightweight gifs.

Note: While writing this blog post, I learned so much that I recreated all my store gifs again. This shows once again that writing a blog can be useful in several unexpected ways.

Creating the base video

Here you can read the official Steam recommendations for store page assets. They suggest a 1170px width in order to maximize quality on high DPI displays. The maximum video duration is 12 seconds and the color space should be set to BT.709.

I register video with OBSStudio. I'm not an OBSStudio power user (yet), therefore I will just give the minimal advice for this post. There are a lot of settings that can influence the final outcome. I also just found out, that depending on your graphics card model, some other settings work better.

I don't have any graphics card, so I simply use a profile with 1080x1920 resolution and 60FPS. That can be set in Controls -> Settings -> Video.
As recording format I use Matroska Video (.mkv) and as video encoder x264. These can be set in Controls -> Settings -> Output -> Recording.
The color space 709 can be set in Controls -> Settings -> Advanced -> Color Space.

I prefer using this settings, because this way I can use the base video also as non-gif. Using the final gif resolution and FPS could also work, but I haven't tested that yet.

Once the registration is done, the video probably needs to be cut. My go to FOSS video editor is Kdenlive. But I have not yet figured out, how to cut videos, without re-encoding and loosing quality. If you happen to know, please write me :-)

For that reason I simply watch the final video and cut it using ffmpeg manually. The following example cuts the video from second 3 to 15, resulting in exact 12 seconds of video.

ffmpeg -copyts -ss 00:03 -i registration.mkv -to 00:15 -map 0 -c copy cut.mkv

Creating the gif for Steam

Once the base video is cut and ready, simply run the command provided by the official README.

ffmpeg -i cut.mkv -f yuv4mpegpipe - | gifski -o result.gif -

To resize it for Steam, simply add the --width flag. You can also set the FPS with the --fps flag, that can be tweaked however you need. For me 12fps works fine and results in a fluid yet small sized gif.

ffmpeg -i cut.mkv -f yuv4mpegpipe - | gifski --fps 12 --width 1170 -o result.gif -

The result is amazing! I won't post it here, since I want to keep my blog lightweight, and the gifs are several MB big. This way, you also have to checkout my Steam page ;-).

No worries about the file size, because Steam will re-encode it again and reduce the size. Simply save the converted gif by Steam (webm in my case) to your computer, to see the final size.

Tip: to replace an existing gif in your Steam page with a new one, simply use the same file name. This way the image will be replaced in all translations, without manual intervention.

Every feedback is welcome

Feel free to write me an email at info@simondalvai.org and comment on Mastodon.

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