Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.
I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects. However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on a particular drive (!). The drive in question happened to have only one FAT32 partition, so I suspect it may have had something to do with it, as using another drive for both input & output would generally work flawlessly. The particular action I was trying to perform was to encode a sequence of rather large JPEG files (3072×2304) into a single video file using the outstanding (but still somewhat experimental and/or unstable) FFV1 lossless codec.
So, I visited the ffmpeg website and looked at some of their bugs, but didn’t see anything related to this. Then, after seeing some of their pre-bug report checklist, I decided to check the version of ffmpeg I had on the system, and found it to be from March. So, I pulled-down a fresh copy of their trunk via subversion and ran configure & make (I did not run make install). Running the resulting ffmpeg binary from this compile run worked perfectly, alhamdulillaah.
The lesson is, if you’re running into a bug with either ffmpeg or any other package, then give a shot at running the latest code, if available. It may seem like common sense, but I had underestimated just how easy it would be. Surely, other packages may not work as simply, but it really was a piece of cake in this case. Now I guess I need to learn how to package RPMs so I can help out the Livna project to get this latest code into their repository, which I also understand is not simple task, as many other projects rely on ffmpeg…
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!
One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time - i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.
Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).
Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 9 is officially released! At least, the official torrents are available. The main site doesn’t seem to be updated yet, but then again, it’s not 10 AM, either. I’m grabbing the x86_64 DVD build on one server and the i386 on the other, so I hope to be seeding by midday.
Update: The Fedora Project site now reflects the release. I should really be getting back to work now…
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9’s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community.
The following is pretty-much ripped from the wiki. The witty banter is added by me. Also, I know I’m not the first (actually, I hope I’m quite close to the last) to have done one of these things. What follows are the features that I consider to be cool and important, but this list is obviously by no means exhaustive or even appropriately representative of Fedora 9. It’s simply a list of what I think will make Fedora 9 so awesome, in shaaʾ Allaah.
Okay, that should be enough flame retardant for now…onwards!
Note to self: If I want my blog posts to show up in an aggregator, make sure to give the admin the right link first…
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) - while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.
Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:
The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded. Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD. There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues. I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding. I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.
Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg - that is the topic for another article, perhaps.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!
Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.
