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Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 00:00
by Toxidious
Hi.

I have fun with my web camera making still pictures with delays and then making movies out of it.

There is some few pieces of software that can do this, but hey all lack some features that VLC have - in general and when it comes to video conversion
  • Very few video formats is supported, and when it's possible to change format in menu, then only the container format differs and the end result looks all the same.
  • The bitrate is needed to be high to avoid pixelated frames - typically I need bitrate to be at least 950kbps to 640x480 sized frames.
  • Only Windows is supported. No Linux support at all.
  • Currently I only know about two free programs that can do this, Imagestovideo and Chronolapse.
Therefore, having a folder containing some thousands of png/jpg/bmp/tif files (names and image format depend of camera capture software) It would be lovely to be able to use VLC to convert from a serie of image files to a complete video file.

In addition, it would be nice having the ability to select a sound file to include in the resulting video. However, I can always use Avidemux to put audio into video - but I don't think that Avidemux supports that many video formats that VLC can convert to.

Thanks

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 20:17
by Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Did you try to use:
vlc /path/to/directory/images/ and adjust the image delay?

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 08 Nov 2012 19:17
by Toxidious
Did you try to use:
vlc /path/to/directory/images/ and adjust the image delay?
Hi.

Can you elaborate? I don't get VLC to work by having a folder as it's command line parameter. It respond just the same way as if there was no argumand passed at all.

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 04 Jan 2013 03:30
by Toxidious
Bump.

Hi. If you know how to do this, I would be very happy if you told me.
I cannot find any online documentation that tell how to play thousands of jpg files as they where each picture in a movie.

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 30 Aug 2016 01:44
by J2897
Save VLC's Playlist in XSPF format and then try this...

Code: Select all

"C:/Program Files/VideoLAN/VLC/vlc.exe" --ignore-config --no-qt-privacy-ask --image-duration=1 "C:\Users\John\Desktop\test.xspf"
The --image-duration=1 will play one image per second.

I've just tested over 600 1080p PNG files.

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 08 Oct 2016 03:15
by Toxidious
J2897 - thanks for an interresting approach, I will test this.
That is for playback only, isn't it? Not to making an video file output.

By the way - I have solved the problem regarding makint timelapse videos - I've spending some time learning to use iSpy.

I've also tested the ffmpeg package (command line to convert a series of images into video file), but I had a problem with program crash, so I just gave that up. Maybe a newer version is more stable.

Re: Images to video - timelapse

Posted: 17 Jan 2021 15:38
by Toxidious
Sorry to awaken a long dead forum thread, but I have a feeling that the most practical solution is found.

Back a couple of years ago playing around with the same, I discovered that Avidemux actually did support this feature. If there is a folder full of image files, the user can drag'n drop that folder into Avidemux. This is tested in Linux version of Avidemux.

Because of the age of the first post, I consider it likely that Avidemux didn't supported this feature back then.