Comments on: On ur laptop, making ur still frames into a movie.

Question: On ur laptop, making ur still frames into a movie.

Jimbob — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 03:29:28 -0800

What's the quickest, easiest way to turn a directory of sequentially numbered JPG files into a video file? Linux or Windows.

I've got a stack of files, generated by POVRAY, named as such:

frame1.jpg
frame2.jpg
...
frame330.jpg

I want to turn then into a video file. MPEG-1 is fine - anything that's reasonably standard will do. I don't really want to have to specify anything apart from the directory the files are in, and the frame rate.

What's the best way to do this? A solution for Linux or Windows would both be okay. Google-disclaimer: The closest I could find was some ancient 16-bit Windows software that produced AVIs from BMPs (not really what I'm after).

By: popcassady

popcassady — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 03:53:40 -0800

On my mac, I use Quicktime Pro. It has an import image sequence option.

Quicktime Pro for Windows.

By: rpn

rpn — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:05:15 -0800

Ffmpeg can do it (available for both windows and linux). For example:



ffmpeg -f image2 -i frame%d.jpg video.mpg

There are (lots) of options to specify the bitrate, output format and size, frame rate etc. See the documentation for the details.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:06:44 -0800

Sorry, I should have also specified free / open souce solutions. I figure turning JPGs into an MPG can't be that difficult, it's not worth US$29.99 for my purposes.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:19:19 -0800

I will give ffmpeg a go after POVRAY has finished rendering, rpn, that looks like a reasonably simple command line.

By: mmascolino

mmascolino — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 04:54:58 -0800

Microsoft Windows Movie Maker will do that (although it will produce a WMA file that might be ok for you or at least then you can convert that into something else).

By: handee

handee — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 07:02:58 -0800

mencoder on linux can do it too.

This line does it using mjpeg, you can use whatever codec you want.

mencoder mf://vq*.jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o output.avi

If you want to subsequently be able to play the avi on Windows look at my answer to my own question yesterday: here. It's a two stage process but the output works in windows and looks OK.

By: handee

handee — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 07:04:47 -0800

Copy and paste mistakee there, sorry. Obviously, vq*.jpg should be replaced by whatever wildcard specifies your stack of jpegs, I tested it on a set which went vq001.jpg etc.

By: Neon

Neon — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 07:16:28 -0800

Doesn't that * need escaping/quoting, otherwise the shell might expand it? In the mencoder man page, it gives this example at the bottom:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

By: mendel

mendel — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 08:34:26 -0800

Neon: It would if "mf://*.jpg" actually matched anything -- that is, if there was a "mf:" directory in the current working directory that contained jpegs. If a wildcard doesn't match it's passed along as a literal argument.

You can test that with "echo mf://*.jpg"

By: dorian

dorian — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 09:34:53 -0800

be careful with wildcards tho -- based on the filenames you have, the frame order may screw up.

ls frame*.jpg will give:

frame100.jpg
frame101.jpg
...
frame109.jpg
frame10.jpg
frame110.jpg
frame111.jpg
...
frame199.jpg
frame1.jpg
...

so either change the naming such that
frame001.jpg
frame002.jpg
...
frame010.jpg
...

or use the ffmpeg example with %d which will "do the right thing" (but %d will not work as a wildcard in regular shell functions...)

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:52:21 -0800

Hmmm. I've finally got around to trying this, and ffmpeg gives doens of the the following errors:

[mjpeg @ 0x8336308]mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cd)

[mjpeg @ 0x8336308]mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c9)

[mjpeg @ 0x8336308]mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2)

[mjpeg @ 0x8336308]huffman table decode error

Before spitting out a video file that doesn't play. mencoder does something pretty similar. But I think it may be a problem on the POVRAY side of things...maybe I only think I'm generating JPGs because of the file extension, when I'm really creating BMPs or something. In the absence of any more suggestions, I'll keep trying...

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:58:28 -0800

Yes...POVRAY was produing PNGs but calling them .JPG. Once converted to JPG, the ffmpeg solution works great.