The new way of converting JPEGs to MPEGs

    I wrote the JPEG to MPEG howto a while ago, and used the best tools that I could find at the time. It was a complicated, evil process, but people still email me a couple of times a month and thank me for it. I think they'll like this way even more.

    For my PhD, I'm taking large numbers of images and displaying them one after another on a monitor so that I can capture the images with a webcam. The reason is a little convoluted, so let's settle for I'm trying to see what sort of image distortion the webcam will impose. I figured that the best way to do this was to simply have a MPEG2 movie that was the images, play it on the machine, and then point the webcam at the monitor. At about this time in a twist of wonderful fate I discovered I could do this in a simple command line with ImageMagick. Let's see how (all of these instructions are based on Debian unstable, but should work anywhere):

    Install ImageMagick 

      apt-get install imagemagick


    Install mpeg2vidcodec

    This isn't packaged for Debian, but I've put a request for package bug in. Do this: 

      wget ftp://ftp.mpegtv.com/pub/mpeg/mssg/mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz
tar xvzf mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz
cd mpeg2
make
cd src/mpeg2dec
cp mpeg2decode /usr/local/bin
cd ../mpeg2enc
cp mpeg2encode /usr/local/bin


    Do the thing

    So, now we can do the thing. In this instance we have a bunch of TIFF files we want to turn into an MPEG2 video. 

      convert *.tif foobar.mpg


    And we're done. Nice, isn't it?

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posted at: 17:20 | path: /jpeg2mpeg | permanent link to this entry
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