[Alt text: GIF from the music video for “Love Shack” by the B-52s. The video depicts people dancing in a convertible, multiple people in suits and dresses dancing (visible from the waist down), martinis, a duck shaking its tail, and two men playing saxophones. The subtitles read:
The Crowdstrike is a kernel-space app that
has no testing process
Crowdstrike! Baby Crowdstrike!
Crowdstrike! Baby Crowdstrike!]
YouTube doesn’t provide GIFs. It provides videos. Use yt-dlp, Aegisub and ffmpeg for a FOSS way of downloading a video, trimming it and burning subtitles into it.
The correct way to get someone to move to FOSS is to show them how to do it, not tell them it exists. OP already said they can do the YouTube -> captioned gif in 10min so you need to provide a simple tutorial that identifies the tools to use, how to set them up, and how to create a workflow to achieve the goal of some format with captions in under 10min.
Notice how I explained what was wrong and how to do it? That’s what’s missing from most “you need to use FOSS” posts, including yours.
Please don’t make me work hard for my memes
It’s really not any harder than what you are currently doing. You’d just use a more reasonable video codec. But you do you, it’s not that bad.