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Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Hardware/software/hints and tips/discussion/webcam links etc
Gina
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Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

I know this has been mentioned in (an)other thread(s) but thought it warranted it's own. I couldn't remember which thread(s) mentioned it.

I am looking into various methods of incorporating an animated time-lapse display of my captured webcam images over the last 24 hours - maybe providing web page thumbnails or list to show several day's worth.

As I see it there are two distinct method sets :-
1. Create slide show or animation file locally and upload it.
2. Upload webcam images only and use a server-side application to produce the slide show or animation.

So far we have had examples of type 2. One using a proprietary (paid for) image-set to swf file generator. I'm afraid I am rather averse to paying for software these days (residing comfortably in the open-source camp).

Looking at animated file formats, GIF is simple but inadequate for this purpose - the sky shows in steps of different shades of blue - not very nice. SWF would seem good as it doesn't have this problem and SWF viewers are free and available as browser add-ons.
Gina

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hills
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by hills »

Well my set up is option 2. Kevin (TNETweather) gave me the info to do this. They can be viewed from the menu at the bottom of my webcam page: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~storerfa ... ebcam.html

I use Cumulus, Yawcam and Maani xml/swf slideshow which has now been replaced, but can still be obtained from here: http://www.maani.us/xml_slideshow/

Yawcam automatically embeds the weather details from Cumulus then uploads the latest image as webcam000.jpg and in the process increments the number in the old image filenames by one, of which I have 150.

xml/swf slideshow uses an xml script to create a slideshow from the images displaying each image for 0.15 seconds. Originally I used a handmade xml script with the following lines repeated 150 times: :roll:

<slide>
<image url='webcam150.jpg' duration='0.15' />
<transition type='none' />

</slide>


This was very unreliable as yawcam tends to fail uploading an image a couple of times a day and this caused the slideshow to error with file not found, so I wrote/plagiarised the attached PHP script to create the xml after checking what images were available. Unfortunately doing this showed the current image first then went backwards for 150 images, so I fed the filenames into an array then reverse sorted them before creating the xml file. Please bear in mind I have never used PHP before so I'm sure there could be a lot of improvements, but hey it works! ;) (Oh and I know the lines that ignore "." and ".." could be in the one statement but I can't be bothered changing it.) Feel free to use it if you find it useful.

As Gina said swf/xml slideshow is the proprietry s/w that cost $50 (I think) but it is licensed to my webpage and I can use it as as many times as I need. You can use it for free but it will only show 10 slides. The motion detection screen on my website also uses it but displays for 5 seconds then uses one of the many transitions. There are many other features like playing a tune, which I did until my wife reminded me I was being a bit of a tosser. (I thought "Ligntning Crashes" by Live went well with the motion detection.) :?

The advantage of this system is it's completely automatic and is now quite robust. With motion detection any new images will automatically be uploaded then included in the slideshow. Secondly this system will always terminate on the current image each time it is run.

EDIT: Oops it won't let me upload a PHP script so here is the contents:

<?php

echo "<slideshow>";

$path = "./webcam/";
$dir_handle = @opendir($path) or die("Unable to open folder");
$i=0;
while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir_handle))) {

if($file == ".")
continue;
if($file == "..")
continue;

$narray[$i]=$file;
$i++;
}
rsort($narray);

for($i=0; $i<sizeof($narray)-1; $i++)
{
echo "<slide>";
echo "<image url='./webcam/$narray[$i]' duration='0.15' />";
echo "<transition type='none' />";
echo "</slide>";
}

{
echo "<slide>";
echo "<image url='./webcam/webcam000.jpg' duration='2' />";
echo "<transition type='none' />";
echo "</slide>";
}

echo " <control x='100' bar_visible='auto' />";
echo "</slideshow>";

?>
Last edited by hills on Mon 24 May 2010 10:50 am, edited 2 times in total.
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mcrossley
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by mcrossley »

Gina
I think Imagemagick can create MPEG movies (if you also install the mpeg encoder) amongst a ton of other stuff, it is available for Unix and meets your criteria of being free :)
Gina
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

Thanks for that Phil :)

And thanks Mark for the suggestion :) I already use ImageMagick, so I'll investigate.
Gina

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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by gemini06720 »

For the display of the movies created by my MovieSalsa, I have been using (experimenting) with 2 scripts from TUFaT's Darren's Script Archive (the 'TUFaT YouTube Video Applet' and the 'TUFaT Multi Video Flash FLV Applet') and one script for the DivX Labs (the 'DivX Plus Web Player').

Why use (experiment) with 3 scripts? The 'TUFaT' scripts use the more standard flash 'flv' file format whereas the 'DivX' script uses the less standard 'divx' file format - the greatest advantages of the DivX format are small file size (half the size of a flash file) and the MKV/H.264 high definition video resolution.

Both player types have controls such as play/pause/rewind.

Here is a link to my WebCam page should you want to have a look at the players.
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by gemini06720 »

Here is an example of a script I used on the WebCam page:

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
     var swfFileName = "multiVideoPlayer.swf";
      var pathToConfig = "multivideo_config.xml";
      var appletName = "multiVideoPlayer"
      var Width = "640";
      var Height = "480";
      var backgroundColourOfSWF = "#000000";
      var so = new SWFObject(swfFileName+"?xml="+pathToConfig, appletName, Width, Height, "8", backgroundColourOfSWF);
      so.addParam("quality", "high");
      so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
      so.addParam('salign', 'lt');
      so.addParam("allowScript","sameDomain");
      so.write("tufat_div");
</script>
The above code uses the TUFaT Multi Video Flash FLV Applet (script). The 'multiVideoPlayer.swf' flash script uses a configuration file from which the required parameters are read and setup (such as the location of the movie files, the different titles (and close caption texts), the colours, etc.).
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by geoffw »

Here is my, not very elegant way of creating my webcam weather movie.

1: I record one image every 60 seconds to the hard drive using Yawcam scheduled from 04.00 to 23.00 daily.
2: I create a slide show (Using a presentation application I have for other uses - ProShow Gold)
3: The show has 0.0 seconds between images and each image is displayed for 0.7 seconds (roughly equivalent to 15fps.
4: is is then saved as a Flash Movie for showing on the web.
5: ProShow created three files including an HTML file but you can also save the HTML code to insert into your own custom web page. (*.flv, *.html and *.swf)
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/sh ... on=7,0,0,0"
width="640" height="390" id="test" align="middle">
<param name="movie" value="slideshow.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="play" value="true" />
<param name="bgColor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<embed src="slideshow.swf"
width="640" height="390"
quality="high"
play="true"
bgColor="#FFFFFF"
wmode="transparent"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
6: for a full day the uploaded file is quite large.
7: Not as flexible as Phil's method but I can't manage PHP scripts and the like.
8: Here is a sample of today's weather.
Geoff
Image
Gina
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

Thanks Ray and Geoff :) I'll study your posts properly later, when I'm not so tired. That video is a lot less boring Geoff :lol: great picture of scurrying clouds :).
Gina

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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by geoffw »

Gina wrote:Thanks Ray and Geoff :) I'll study your posts properly later, when I'm not so tired. That video is a lot less boring Geoff :lol: great picture of scurrying clouds :).
I've just uploaded today's...... 26th ...... a much more active day!
Geoff
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hills
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by hills »

Here's a much easier third option:

Register your webcam's URL with weather underground and they'll collect the images for you and create movies for each day: http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/ind ... range=intl

They're extremely low res but better than nothing. ;)
Gina
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

Thanks Phil :) I've been thinking of adding my station to Wunderground - when I get the time. I have a lot on my mind at present.
Gina

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hills
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by hills »

I registered my webcam, it took a day or so to be approved. Here's the quality what you get:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/hil ... urrent.flv


I don't think its too bad considering they're keeping a video everyday for you. ;)
Gina
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

It's a bit fast :lol:
Gina

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hills
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by hills »

:lol: Its funny you should say that... I was just looking at mine and wondering if I should speed them up a bit. Given that I live so close to the clouds at 500m and only take a picture every 5 minutes, I won't get that smooth effect that I've seen on other's webcams.

What do you think??
Gina
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Re: Displaying webcam images as slide show or animation

Post by Gina »

hills wrote::lol: Its funny you should say that... I was just looking at mine and wondering if I should speed them up a bit. Given that I live so close to the clouds at 500m and only take a picture every 5 minutes, I won't get that smooth effect that I've seen on other's webcams.

What do you think??
I think an image every minute at least and if you're going to make a video rather than just a slide show, probable more often. The clouds here have been moving quite a lot in a minute. And I think 24 hours wants to last something like a minute or more. Of course, a video at a decent frame rate and image size takes a lot of bandwidth and will depend on the viewer's internet connection speed. That's probably why they use a relatively small image size.

Applying some arithmetic... One image a minute is 1440 frames per day if you include night, or 1080 for 18 hours a day as I have set. At 20 fps this would last 54 secs. Actually, I think 10 fps would be reasonable, if a bit flickery, though if only the changing part of the image were refreshed I think it'd look fine.
Gina

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