[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!]
GIF is really terrible as a video format. You can upload actual video with sound on Lemmy (most instances use a 20MB, 900-frame limit, also server-side ffmpeg often times out) or Pixelfed (15MB, unknown frame limit).
Yes, I know you didn't bother to use an AI or commission an artist to sing the new lyrics but you could mux in an instrumental version (or heck, even just leave the original) for me and others who may remember the melody from the radio but don't associate it with the music video.
True as that may be, I know how to add subtitles to a GIF from YouTube in 10 minutes or less. I don’t know how to do that to a video.
YouTube doesn't provide GIFs. It provides videos. Conversion to GIF is an unnecessary step. Use yt-dlp, Aegisub and ffmpeg for a FOSS way of downloading a video, trimming it and burning subtitles into it.
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.