Converting Videos and Creating Timelapse from Photographs in Linux

I've been building a secure entry and logging system for our new local makerspace, and I realized it would be nice to have a timelapse of all the check ins and check outs.

Remembering there is a tool that is related to mplayer, the tool I used for my Tardis, I tried it out. Works out really nice!

First get the tool onto your machine:

sudo apt install mencoder

Next, we need some parameters:

• o - filename to output
• oac - copy: copy do not re-encode audio
• oac - mp3lame: MP3 with LAME.
• ovc - libavcodec (video codec)
• ovc:- x264: H.264 codec
• lavcopts - MPEG-1 video
• of - output container format

To convert from one format to another you would do:

mencoder input.mp4 -o converted.mp4 -ovc x264

Another example

mencoder input.mov -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video -of mpeg

I have found, however, other tools produce more widely compatible files.

But that is not the issue today, we want to convert frames into timelapse. Turns out that is easy too:

mencoder mf://*.JPG -mf fps=5:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi

You will see something like this:

Flushing video frames.
Writing index...
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.

Video stream: 6271.630 kbit/s  (783953 B/s)  size: 109753533 bytes  140.000 secs  701 frames

That's because I didn't set the frame aspect info - not necessary

To test it, of course, you can run it through mplayer:

mplayer output.avi