Gardencam video
On the Gardencam page, I’d mentioned about wanting to capture a daily set of jpegs from the camera and convert them to a video to give a ‘day in the life of…’ movie.Several people including Robert Shilston suggested using mencoder, part of the MPlayer project. I got MPlayer installed on my SuSE box (that’s another story altogether), and went through the motions of getting mencoder to create the video. If you look at the Gardencam page, you’ll see I’m using a DLink DCS-900 network camera.
Numerous people were successfully doing the same thing I wanted to do, but whenever I did it, all I got was a repeating version of the first frame with some weird artefacts at the top of the video. I’d dug around in several places, but been unable to find anyone else with the same problem until last night. After Robert emailed me asking how I was getting on, I decided to have a look on the mencoder support mailing list. About five pages down, I came across a guy with the same problem, and get this, using almost the same camera. He was using the wireless version, but I was prepared to bet that the web server firmware was the same on both cameras.
Taking his suggestion, I processed all the time-lapse jpegs through ImageMagick’s convert utility, using a little shell script to move them into a different directory. Running mencoder on the new directory and lo and behold, a fully working video.
Apparently, this was fixed in a CVS version of mencoder, but I thought I’d document this just in case anyone else encounters the same problem.
Thanks to Robert and everyone else who put forwarded suggestions.
