[Gdal-dev] Animation?

[Andy Bunn]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gdal-dev-bounces at lists.maptools.org
> [mailto:gdal-dev-bounces at lists.maptools.org]On Behalf Of Didrik Pinte
> Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 3:17 AM
> To: gdal-dev
> Subject: Re: [Gdal-dev] Animation?
>
>
> Le lundi 20 mars 2006 à 15:24 -0800, Tyler Mitchell a écrit :
> > Didrik,
> > I'd love to hear more about how you did the Python, Mplayer
> animation bit.  Sounds really interesting.  I can't quite wrap my
> head around MPlayer, but am very familiar with python - so I'd
> love to see what you did.
> >
> > Tyler
>
> That was pretty easy in fact.
>
> My need was to create a movie using pictures created by MapServer (a
> moving tank during an agricultural season). I've used python mapscript
> to pilot mapserver and create png output pictures. Then a really really
> simple call to mplayer does the trick and build a beautiful movie.
>
> Here is the extract used to build the movie :
>
> def createMovie(basePath,path):
>         '''
>         Create a movie using all the pictures stored in the basePath
> (png files). The movie is compressed using Microsoft codec msmpeg4v2 in
> order to be readable on windows computers. The frames per second are
> fixed at 1.
> 	TODO : 	- use popen to redirect stdout and stderr
> 		- make a second pass for better compression/quality
>         '''
>
>         try:
>                 os.system('/usr/bin/mencoder "mf://%s/00*.png" -mf
> type=png:fps=1  -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vpass=1:$opt
> -nosound -o %s '% (basePath,path))
>         except:
>                 log.error("Error during movie creation")
>                 return False
>         return os.path.exists(path)
>
> Pretty easy ;-)
>
> I did it on a Linux computer but it's obvious that it can be done on a
> Windows computer with a full mplayer installation.
>
> Didrik
>

Thanks all for the tips. I've ended up doing this in R via the Rgdal
bindings. This made the most sense since my image analysis was being done
this way also.

-Andy