Mencoder Timelapse

Thursday, 23 July, 2015

Ages ago I blogged about creating timelapse videos from my GoPro using Mencoder. This takes the output JPEGs from the camera (at 10s intervals) and the uses Mencoder to stack them in to an MJPEG using this command:

mencoder “mf://.jpg” -mf fps=6 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vbitrate=1600 vqmin=3

However I found that some of the JPEGs were out of sync - they are all sequentially numbered from the camera, but the OS *doesnt
pipe the filenames in the right order. The solution to this is to create a textfile with the sequential list (the /on switch) and stripped of any other information (the /a-d and /b switches). In Windows I used

dir /a-d /b /on > list.txt

This is then followed by

mencoder “mf://@list.txt” -mf fps=3 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vbitrate=1600 vqmin=3 

which fixed the problem!

P.S. After pulling the JPEGs off the camera I used Xnview to batch resize the photos to 666x500
P.P.S. The MJPEG is then uploaded to Youtube to create an mp4.

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