time lapse: convert single jpg images to a movie

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since they’re tearing down the buildings in front of our office and there’s been a cool webcam positioned near the site i wrote a little script to get the images and wanted to convert them into a time-lapse…

here’s the knowledge i gained from this little experiment.

first i thought that image magick could do the trick, i noticed that to create a mpeg2 video i needed a little encode program that i found here.
compiled this and moved it to /usr/bin

then i executed convert in my image directory

convert -delay 10 *.jpg m2v:time_lapse-test.mpg

the output was a nice little motion jpeg which i couldn’t use in my little video software called open movie editor (there’s probably better stuff out there but this is the first one i found and tried and seemed simple)

so i tried the ffmpeg approach

ffmpeg -r 5 -i %12d.jpg -y -an time_lapse-test.mpg

which i didn’t get working at all since the regex type image path just didn’t seem to find any images… so i gave up quite quickly.

so the next try was mencoder (should’ve tried this to begin with since mplayer/mencoder can just about do anything)

mencoder -ovc lavc -mf fps=3:type=jpg 'mf://*.jpg' -o time_lapse-test.avi

the result was a bad quality video… so i started using some params to get this sorted out

using this as help i tried “-ovc copy”, which was great and gave me a 1 to 1 copy of the jpegs

mencoder -ovc copy -mf w=800:h=371:fps=6:type=jpg 'mf://*.jpg' -o time_lapse-test.avi

great!! … i’m back at the mjpg which i can’t use in open movie editor!

so let’s encode it into some other video codec… i installed x264 and tried:

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=371:fps=15:type=jpg -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=5:8x8dct:frameref=2:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:qp_constant=26 -o time_lapse-test.avi

and i just didn’t get it to work without having to compile things… so i gave up once more ;)

some more research and after testing a few different bitrates, this is what gave me good results:

mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpg -mf w=800:h=371:type=jpg:fps=15 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.2:mpeg_quant:scplx_mask=0.1:tcplx_mask=0.1:naq -o time_lapse-test.avi

the important things here is setting the frames per second to 15 and the codec to mpeg4 with a bitrate of 2160000. everything else was gathered on different sites and really almost make no difference (in what you see at least)

so then i quickly edited movie… and saved it, it was way too big so encoded it again but this time with 2 passes and a smaller bitrate:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=1620000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:vlelim=-4:vcelim=7:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.10:naq:vqcomp=0.7:vqblur=0.2:mpeg_quant -mf type=sgi:fps=25 -nosound -o /dev/null time_lapse-test.avi

to generate the divx2pass.log then in the second pass i also added the mp3 music:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vbitrate=1620000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv:vqmin=3:vlelim=-4:vcelim=7:lumi_mask=0.07:dark_mask=0.10:naq:vqcomp=0.7:vqblur=0.2:mpeg_quant -mf type=sgi:fps=25  -audiofile "/home/me/music.mp3" -oac copy -o time-lapse_216k_mp3.avi time_lapse-test.avi

and there you have the final movie!

delete divx2pass.log and upload to youtube :)

oh yeah… and added some meta tags

ffmpeg -title "destruction time-lapse" -author "munzli" -comment "www.munz.li" -acodec copy -vcodec copy -i time-lapse_162k_mp3.avi time-lapse_162k_mp3_meta.avi

and here you have it (needs to be high quality because compressed it looks even worse)

[edit]
well youtube blocked my video saying that a copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in my video. oh well the music industry is just something you shouldn’t support! just don’t understand why you can’t have a little video online that even mentions the music at the end and might even bring a song to a wider audience!

i encourage everybody to use riaaradar before purchasing their next album!

mythtv with mantis and DVB-S2 (TechniSat SkyStar HD2 continued…)

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well thanks to awf and his comment i checked out mythtv (the release-0-21-fixes branch) and applied this patch, compiled and it kinda works.

that was the short version, here’s the longer one:

check out mythtv
svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/

download this patch right here and apply it from the mythtv folder using
patch -p0 < mythtv_multiproto.5.patch

then make sure you've got all the qt3 development libraries, the XvMC development libraries aswell as LAME and all the others (don't quite remember the whole list) but if you compile you'll find out what your missing.

to configure i used awf's parameters described in his post
./configure –enable-xvmc –enable-dvb –disable-hdhomerun –disable-firewire –enable-xvmc-opengl –enable-opengl-video –enable-opengl-vsync –enable-proc-opt –extra-cxxflags=-I/path/to/mantis/linux/include –extra-cflags=-I/path/to/mantis/linux/include
of course don't forget to correct the path to the mantis driver build.

of course now
make
sudo make install

then configure mythtv using mythtv-setup.

awf was nice enough to send me the dtv_multiplex table (which contains all the transport information for hotbird 13°E and astra 19.2°E) and so i went on to channel scanning... have all the hotbird channels... but can't scan astra eventhough i think i've got the disecq settings correct! if i look into the database it has my card and the inputs doubled, i can delete everything and it recreates them like that. soooo, a little help on the diseqc settings would be greatly appreciated ;)

of course if anybody want's the dtv_multiplex for hotbird and astra i'll gladly send it to you since it did help me out a lot! (of course if awf is cool with that)

thanks a bunch for the comments left here they helped out alot!

UPDATE: ok, got the astra channels scanned too. thanks to awf who pointed out Western union fees that i needed two video inputs (right now both set to EIT Western union fees that 's why i thought one wouldn't make a difference).

it scans ASTRA HD+ and ANIXE HD but it can't get a lock on both channels through mythtv. so the multiproto myth patch is still missing something or does anybody else have a craigslisthonda.net good idea?

howto run a TechniSat Skystar HD2 on linux

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since i’m switching from my analog WinTV-PVR-500 to a DVB-S setup in my mythtv box I installed a TechniSat Skystar HD2 card (a rebranded Azurewave AD SP400 CI VP-1041) and to my surprise I got it running fairly quickly.

here’s a description on the first steps i took in creating a mythtv box with DVB-S and hopefully DVB-S2.

install mercurial (distributed version control system). In debian based systems:
sudo apt-get install mercurial

then obtain the latest mantis multiproto drivers. there is no patching necessary for the card to run.
hg clone http://jusst.de/hg/mantisthen compile and install.
make
make install

more info can be obtained here under “Method 2″.

the modules can be loaded manually but to test the correct loading a reboot is easier. now the card should be loaded at boot.

to create a channels.conf you’ll need scan from the dvb-apps located on linuxtv.org.
the way to get this working quite easy is described here. the TerraTec Cinergy S2 PCI HD CI is another clone of the same card.

make sure that the changed line in the Makefile has the correct path. in the example it is
CPPFLAGS += -I/usr/src/mantis/linux/includebut since i compiled in my home directory my path was different (this is quite obvious but i thought i’d state it to be sure).

EDIT:i noticed that scan with the patch don’t work anymore… it should work just using the compiled scan in the dvb-apps/utils directory!

while running scan:
./scan dvb-s/Astra-19.2E > ~/.szap/channels.confcheck to see if these lines (or any stating: Using ‘STB0899 Multistandard’ DVB-S2) appear.
----------------------------------> Using 'STB0899 Multistandard' DVB-S2
Tune to frequency 11914500
DVB-S IF freq is 1314500
0x0006 0x0081: pmt_pid 0x0062 PREMIERE -- PREMIERE HD (running, scrambled)
0x0006 0x0082: pmt_pid 0x0063 PREMIERE -- DISCOVERY HD (running, scrambled)
0x0006 0x0084: pmt_pid 0x0065 BetaDigital -- ANIXE HD (running)
0x0006 0x0083: pmt_pid 0x0064 BetaDigital -- ASTRA HD+ (running)then you know that DVB-S2 is working also! yay!

afterwards i had 1187 services only on Astra 19.2E. half of them scrambled but hey, the numbers count ;)

now to test the whole thing enter the dvb-apps/test directory and try zapping to a channel (check in the ~/.szap/channels.conf to see which number is good to go and not scrambled).
./szap2 -r -n 085
the output will show you some channel data and as soon as “FE_HAS_LOCK” is displayed (keep szap running) open mplayer in a different terminal
mplayer /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0
and you should see a picture! alright, the card is up and running!

all seems good but i still have a problem with DVB-S2. and that is as soon as i’m trying to display a DVB-S2 channel like ANIXE HD (channel #550 in my channels.conf)
./szap2 -r -t 2 -n 550i get a “FE_HAS_LOCK” but mplayer then just returns:
TS file format detected.
VIDEO MPEG2(pid=1535) AUDIO A52(pid=1539) NO SUBS (yet)! PROGRAM N. 0
and that’s it…

i think i’m missing some codecs or something (w32codecs,DeCSS, x264, etc. is installed).
any help is appreciated though ;)

NOTE: don’t forget to add the option “-t 2” for DVB-S2 for szap

UPDATE: i noticed that when i zap to a HD station and wait long enough i get this error right after the “TS file format detected”:
Too many audio packets in the buffer: (4096 in 7340032 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option.
MPEG: FATAL: EOF while searching for sequence header.
Video: Cannot read properties.

so i’m still unsuccessful at watching HD tv.

UPDATE 2!!: to watch HD tv stations you need the option -p when calling szap2!
-p : add pat and pmt to TS recording (implies -r)

so try
./szap2 -r -p -t 2 "ASTRA HD+" and open mplayer… wow

my 3GHz system that’s gonna be the mythbackend sometimes quits with mplayer saying:
************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************which means… my frontend system is gonna have to be upgraded!

amr sounds in 3gp videos

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well ubuntu out of the box doesn’t support amr sounds often found in mobile phone videos. the problem is that ffmpeg isn’t compiled with amr support… medibuntu has a version compiled with amr support, so….

add a medibuntu repository file:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

this creates a new source list in the sources.list.d folder and leaves your main source file unchanged.

then also add the GPG key:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

this is also described on the medibuntu page.

you should get an update notice and if not it should be sufficient to update the libavcodec1d (ffmpeg codec library).

now your mobile phone 3gp videos should play with sounds.

from firefox to epiphany/gecko to epiphany/webkit

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since firefox is getting slower each day the developers code. i started using epiphany instead.

it has some cool features like the “Smart Bookmarks” which i have configured to be some sites in my toolbar that i can directly enter the search term. in the bottom screenshot you see an example wikipedia search and how it is set up. smart bookmarks are even smarter though, check out some samples they have on the galeon website.

smart bookmarks

since the gecko engine has gradually made me sicker and sicker i decided to recompile my epiphany browser with webkit. woohoo! so i followed the howto here.

after installing libxslt-dev and the gstreamer development packages (libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev and libgstreamer0.10-dev) which solved my dependency problems i compiled WebKit/GTK+ from the svn source with the option –enable-video just for the heck of it.

running the very simple browser found under ./Programs/GtkLauncher i receive the user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/525.1+) lt-GtkLauncher

webkit gtklauncher

to fix the glib requirement version >= 2.15.6 i just installed glib from the hardy repositories. then compiled epiphany with the option –with-engine=webkit.

now if i check the user agent i get:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/525.1+) epiphany

and i’m finishing this post right here with epiphany/webkit.

about

a fun little experiment but it seems it’s just not ready to actually use on a everyday surfing basis!
some things that don’t work:

  • gmail (i’m guessing because of redirects)
  • http authorization
  • flash content (no youtube browsing)
  • secure http connections
  • and it has bugs in various form fields

ace archives and unace-nonfree

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well you’ve gotta love ace archives, there’s actually still people using it ;)
i received one today and wenn trying to unace in my linux i get (with t as parameter to verify the archive):
munzli@freddy:~$ unace t archive.ace
UNACE v1.2 public version

Processing archive: archive.ace

Authenticity Verification:
created on 31.3.2002 by Laudahn

thefirstfile.txt
 Analyzing
File compressed with unknown method. Decompression not possible.

Error occurred

well after searching around i found out that there is a nonfree version of unace. how edutorio.de handy. it’s located in the multiverse repository of gutsy and can be installed with:
sudo apt-get install unace-nonfree

now you’ve got the unace version that will decompress my archive and another version named “unace-free”. i’m not sure why they named it the other Moneygram fees way around in the repos, but it works…

iconv script for converting character encodings

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well the whole character encoding problems in the german language with utf-8 and iso-8859-1 is pretty tedious. a fine little program called iconv does the whole encoding changes pretty nicely but… (well there had to be a but huh?) you can’t switch encodings with input and output being the same file.
so moving/deleting/renaming makes it a little painfull.

i wrote a little script that does this for me, it’s really simple but simplifies everything.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert arguments handle different encodings
iconv -f $1 -t $2 "$3" -o "$3-new"
# Create backup
mv "$3" "$3~"
mv "$3-new" "$3"

i called it “econv” and instead of:
iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 myfile.txt -o myfile_new.txt

then deleting the old file and renaming the new one, i just type:
econv iso-8859-1 utf-8 myfile.txt

which does the trick and even creates a “myfile.txt~” backup of the original.

put the script in your /usr/local/bin or whatever you prefer and you can use it globally.

using pictures for picasa and flickr that include geotag exif data

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just received a picture that has geotag information in it. the only problem is: it seems that geotag isn’t equal geotag. the picture has GPSVersionID, GPSLongitudeRef and GPSLongitude tag in the exif data like it’s supposed to.
uploading this to flickr worked perfectly, it displays the town name and location where it was taken. pretty cool if you ask me. here’s an example:
geotaged flickr image

well now to the big problem, google picasa doesn’t understand this kind of geotag… how to fix this? well i found out that exiftool knows all kinds of cool exif data and can also rewrite them. what we need to do is change the GPSVersionID from “2.2.0.0″ to “0.0.2.2″. GPSVersionID 2.2.0.0 is the default and basically means that it’s version 2.2, it seems that picasa doesn’t think so and wants it to be 0.0.2.2 (which seems to be more logical for a 2.2 version but i don’t really know who’s right here).

well what you can do is install exiftool, under debian/ubuntu that would mean:
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl and for all you windows users you’ll have to download the zip file from the site mentioned above.

now all you need to do is rewrite the exif tag, to do this for a whole folder you’d use:
exiftool -GPSVersionID=0.0.2.2 -overwrite_original imagepath/*.jpg

then exiftool tells you how many images have been updated.

now let’s login to picasa and see what happens… after i uploaded the picture i went into the album and the picture is nicely placed on the map:
geotaged picasa image

no need to pick out the location or anything!

here’s my link to the picasa test and the flickr test.

only thing missing now is a GPS system :)

[update] for all you german users, if google isn’t set to english you won’t be able to see the map stuff on picasa because it’s english only atm.

[update2] i also noticed that there’s no need to change the exif GPSVersionID anymore for picasa to place the photo… nice…

coloring fg baja rims

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well here’s something totally different that i thought i’d kuiken.co post about.

how to get you r/c rims, in my case my new baja rims from fg, colored in the color you’d like instead of the plain old white.

all you need to do is buy some textile coloring. the normal kind that you can buy in the drugstore, just make sure it’s suitable for acetate/nylon/polyamid.

i bought some yellow coloring from ideal. i’ve seen others do it with simplicol but i couldn’t find that stuff around here.

first things first, get your rims nice and clean. grease on the rims could lead to uneven coloring.
then get a big enough pot for the rims to fit in. i didn’t have one, so i just took one that would accompany one rim at a time in the hopes of getting them all about the same color.

heat up some water, nice and close to the boiling point and then mix in one bag of textile coloring (mine was the kind without the fixation salt which will also work). make sure the water doesn’t boil (i’d say around 60-80° celcius is good) and throw in your rims. which would look like this.
cooking the rims

i let mine in there for exactly 25 minutes then cleaned it off and voila
one rim finished

now on to the next one.
i used a timer to get exactly another 25 minutes. turns out i had to lay it back in for another minute to get the same color tone as the first one. after doing this for all four here’s what they look like
finished rims

cool, i didn’t know exactly what color would actually come out but orange is great, like the baja prototype.

here’s the wheels mounted
fg baja

another fun experiment that turned out better than expected…