Re: Time for Some Movie Magick

[elwarren]

Very nice. The movie is cool too, better than anything I've seen on tv so far :-)

I have been working on a similar project and just have a few thoughts to share regarding some problems I've run into.

I grab an image once every 30 seconds via wget called from cron. A nightly job moves these images out of the download directory and into directories sorted by date. With that many images I started exceeding the command line arg limits. Now I sort images into subdirs broken down to /cam/year/month/day/hour/

The cool part about this is that I can easily generate a movie of, say, every sunrise in the month of July with a command like: jpegtoavi -f 6 320 240 /cam/2004/07/*/05/*.jpg I'm an oracle guy but this works so well I haven't gotten around to building the db portion.

I build my movies as MotionJPEG videos using the jpegtoavi tool. It is much faster than building mpegs with convert and there is no loss of detail or artifacting like you sometimes get with mpegs. Your video is actually very clear, I'm going to have to revisit the way I build my mpegs for dvd burning.

I use a tool called fdupes to get rid of duplicate images. The cam I monitor starts at 7:00am and shuts off at 10:00pm, but I grab images for 2 hours before and after, to accomodate for the server clocks being out of sync and clock changes in spring/fall. This was faster than the solution I had written in perl :-(

Again, cool project. Glad I'm not the only crazy guy watching some cam that doesn't do much unless you look at it a day at a time :-0

[abitkin]

:) yeah, rather than the cron every 30 seconds, I found the directory where they store the image, (along with the last 250 of them.) And wget the index (as they have an apache dir listing as their index) gets me all of them. Anyways, here's the link to my webserver. It won't handle a lot of traffic, but a little it may do. Shuts down at 10 pm, starts at 5 am, movies are done on another machine and uses rsync to upload.