All entries for Tuesday 14 January 2014

Webcam timelapse – 2013

Follow-up to Webcam timelapse – January 2013 and February 2013 from Mike's blag

Yep, this is the whole of 2013 through the University webcam. I say whole. There will be a few small gaps of a minute or so here and there because the machine on which the script that grabbed the images was running did not have 100% uptime. Also it seems that at 15:23:26 on 19th March the webcam crashed or something because all the images from that time until 11:35:01 on 21st March are the same.

As with previous timelapses, images were grabbed from webcam once per minute. The video is made with 48 images per second. Each day lasts about 29 seconds and the video is 2 hours 59 minutes and ~1.2GB. No, I haven't sat and watched it all the way through.

Download

I put the video together by making a video for each day then joining them up. It could be done all in one go but making separate videos means it's easier to spot issues. For example I noticed the video for 20th March had a considerably smaller filesize than the others and that the videos for 19th and 21st were also slightly smaller than average. It also reduces the risk of leaving something running, checking it two hours later and finding all the output is garbage.

I used ffmpeg. The command for each day's video looks like

$ ffmpeg -r 48  -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' -an -vcodec libx264 -f mp4 -threads 0  -b:v 1000k foo.mp4

It took about two hours to generate all the videos on a 2.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad. (A single video took about 16 seconds. On a 1.6Ghz Intel Core Duo a single video took about five and half minutes and on an ARM Marvell Kirkwood 1.2GHz it took about 42 minutes.)

To join them up you need to make a list of all the filenames

$ for i in mp4s/*;do echo "file '${i}'" ;done > list.txt

Then use ffmpeg's concat demuxer

$ ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt -c copy  -movflags faststart webcam2013.mp4

The -movflafs faststart argument tells ffmpeg to 'Run a second pass moving the index (moov atom) to the beginning of the file.' This means that when the video is viewed in a web browser playback can start straight away rather than waiting for the entire video to be downloaded.

Mike Willis : 14 Jan 2014 12:34 |  Tags: Ffmpeg Webcam |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem