Converting avi to gif

I'd love a recommendation on a free, not shareware and yet good avi to gif converter software - got any hints? :O

Just kill yourself now..

Ulead has a gif animator program that can read in avi's directly.  The interface is really good with the frames laid out along the bottom and the layers/objects in the frames over on the right.  You have control over how much dithering it does, what colors it tries best to preserve or the exact pallete if you want, can cut out parts of frames, etc.. 

You are still better off cloning all your duplicate frames in avisythn with a dupe filter and using the advanced cleaning filters available in avisynth and vdub before importing the avi, however.  Filters for video are just fuck leagues ahead of the shit you can find for images without paying up the nose (you can export the gif you are working on to photoshop with layers for frames, but still the default filters there are horrible).

Oh, I thought you said non-free.  All the free ones are shit, sorry.

It's true, all free ones are shit. Use the one here http://www.ucansoft.com/, once you make it so it is registered it can convert between the two wtih a few options.

mplayer -vo gif89a

open source, fast, reliable ... nothing beats it and afaik gif output runs on all OS' without problem

'nothing beats it' lmao.  at the very least you'd need to decimate the video.

So anyway. Does anyone know a shareware (or anything like that) gif converter ... And his crack?

if you have gimp, get gimp animation package.  you can import avi with each frame as a layer, and then edit it from there (reducing frame count, optimizing, etc), then save as animated .gif