Taking advantage of Discord Nitro

Nitro is a subscription to Discord that comes with cool benefits: my favourite being able to claim a custom tag and having an animated avatar. So once I had it, those were the first things I wanted to take advantage of. Custom tag was easy, but when it came time to find a nice animated banner and avatar, no luck. So rather than using poor quality ones, I decided to make my own.

Dimensions

The first thing that I had to figure out were the dimensions of the banner and avatar; I wanted to make sure the scaling was perfect. I first had to enable inspect element so that I could figure out the exact dimensions.

This is what I gathered:

• Avatar 1:1 ratio
  • channel list: 32 x 32
  • sidebar: 48 x 48
  • popout: 80 x 80
  • modal: 120 x 120
• Banner 8:3 ratio
  • popout: 300 x 120
  • modal: 600 x 240

For the banner, you can either play it safe with the popout size as it will double in scale for modal, or go the other way and hope your image scales down without looking bad.

When it comes to the avatar, your best bet is to avoid dither and go with 120 x 120.

Creating

I use FFmpeg for all video modification.

0. Start with good quality source
1. Use mpv to figure out exact times to cut
2. Trim down source to desired clip
3. Crop to correct ratio
4. Optionally apply concat and reverse modifiers if clip doesn't loop smoothly
5. Optionally export video straight to gif (it will be dithered)
6. Export video to png frames
7. Optionally stabilise frames using any image editor
8. Use gifski to convert frames to gif

I might make a little shell script that automates the process.

Conclusion

Yeah, maybe it's a little overkill, but you can't argue with the final result.