[Qgis-developer] working with temporal data

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Anita

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Anita Graser <anitagraser at gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Few days ago, I stumbled upon this new ESRI tool to work with temporal data:
> http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgis/archive/2010/04/16/New-experience-and-tools-for-working-with-temporal-data.aspx
>
> Such a tool would be really useful for my work any many others too I
> believe. So, I've been thinking about writing a python plugin that basically
> adjusts the layers subsetString to the chosen time frame. But before I start
> coding, I'd like to ask your opinion on what would be the best way to
> implement such a functionality and maybe somebody already implemented it or
> something similar.
>
> On a related topic: I'd also be interested in a "Save as Animation"
> functionality similar to "Save as Image". Do you think it's reasonable to
> implement such a functionality in Python? Do you know any libraries worth
> considering for this job?

An interesting idea for a plugin! The proposed approach with
subsetString should work. When it comes to handling of animations, you
could try to use mencoder (a companion of mplayer) for converting a
series of images to video [1]. I have also some experience with ffmpeg
library for encoding video - it has C api, but it looks there are some
python libraries that wrap it (pyffmpeg, pymedia).

[1] http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html

Bye
Martin