Question

Is it possible to create a video file, mp4 or otherwise that is built up frame by frame? Basically I have a ip camera ftping an image every X seconds to a server. I would like to via a cron job take the all the images from the last time it was run to the current time and create a video out of them and if the video exists then append the images to the end.

Ideally I would like to keep a rolling hour of video in a single video file and a rolling 6 hours of still images all in a bash script to be croned. Each still image is about 30k an sized at 640×480. As it is right now, I have the rolling 6 hours of stills working.

I’m guessing its not as simple at cat image.jpg >> video.mp4. I would be happy with motion jpeg if I really could just append the files though.

This is on a Linux system.

Answer 1

mencoder solution.

#assuming that your image sequence has correct modification times
ls -rt1 *.jpg > list_of_images.txt

mencoder -nosound \
  -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
  -mf fps=25:type=jpg 'mf://@list_of_images.txt' \
  -o video.avi

Mencoder is from the Mplayer package. You probably will need play with the -lavcopts for the best result.