Time lapse from a webcam

2006/10/31 05:35:00

Thought I would make up some timelapse movies using my webcam. There is probably a mighty fine gui for doing this but nothing beats the command line for geek points.

First capture your images, I just wrote a script that ran vgrabbj every 10 seconds ( I could not get the daemon mode to work!) then ran the following command to create a movie from that one.

find . -iname "*.jpg" |sort |transcode -i /dev/stdin --use_rgb -g 640x480 -x imlist,null -k -z -y ffmpeg -F h264 -o timelaps.avi

How it works:

The find and sort command create a list of filenames that are piped to transcode.

• -i /dev/stdin - read file from standard imput
• –use_rgb - you just need this
• -g 640×480 - this should be your image size
• -x imlist,null - Use ImageMagik to convert from a list of files and null for sound
• -k - reverse the red and blue, I needed this you may not.
• -x - turn it upsidedown, again you may not need this
• -y ffmpeg - use ffmeg to process the output
• -F h264 - Tell ffmpeg to use the h264 codec
• -o timelapse.avi - write it all out to the file.

Quite simple really!

My first attempt I have put up on youtube, might need to tweak some values to make it run at a nicer speed and not be so blocky!

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