Movies

This directory holds some FLI/FLC animated movies, and a java applet to display them.

FLI movies are an old, maybe Autocad inspired format. It is based on GIFs, and the differences between successive frames. The html files below will show you the (probably very boring) movies generated from the Logitech/Connectix Color Quickcam I have on my desk. This machine is uses linux, and if I were to buy another webcam, it would not be from Logitech.

Once the Quickcam was working, it was fairly simple to string together a set of unix scripts using public domain software to create these movies.

• cqcam -- a linux color quickcam program
• ppm2fli -- converts a set of PortablePixMaps to FLI format movies

  ppm2fli -g320x200 -f makestdinppm  $TEMPFILE $MOVIEPREFIX.fli
  

  was the exact command I used
• makestdinppm -- converts graphic files read from standard input into PPM format files. I wrote this as a simple wrapper script

  #! /bin/bash
  convert - ppm:-
  

  It uses ImageMagick's

  convert

  program
• ImageMagick -- a great set of tools for manipulating images
• Linux/Unix -- the nice thing about linux and unix is that the commands are used in an object oriented way... Compared to Windows with Programs written in Object Oriented Lanuguages, but with a procedural interface, Unix programs are written in a great many languages and are connected in Object Oriented Ways. I was able to take a bunch of real programs written by very different people, deal with the data as an object, and integrate Java, HTML, Image Processing Software, and scheduling software to do a task. It could of course also be done in windows, but one would have to write all of these things into one program. The cool thing about Unix is that programs can easily run other programs
• cron -- scheduling software. This runs programs and scripts periodically to snap a picture every 10 minutes, and to make a movie once a day. These actions require two lines:

  */10 * * * * my_webcam
  01 1 * * * * my_makemovie

• bash -- shell/scripting language. A good scripting language makes it possible to automate programs. Everytime I take a picture, I save the last one, calculate the difference between the two pics, and place them where the web can see them. I do this with:

   cameraProg='/usr/local/bin/cqcam'
  combineProg='/usr/X11R6/bin/combine'
  FileCurrent=/home/drf5n/public_html/images/camera.jpg
     FilePrev=/home/drf5n/public_html/images/cameralast.jpg
     FileDiff=/home/drf5n/public_html/images/cameradiff.jpg
  
    cp $FileCurrent     $FilePrev
    $cameraProg $* -j > $FileCurrent 
    $combineProg -compose difference $FilePrev $FileCurrent $FileDiff 
    cp ${FileCurrent} ${FileNew}
  

  which may look complicated, but is fairly easy to learn and modify.

	Name	Last modified	Size	Description
	Parent Directory		-
	LAST24.html	20-Apr-2000 19:32	1.0K
	LAST24.old.html	20-Apr-2000 19:31	1.0K
	LAST24.zip.html	20-Apr-2000 19:45	1.0K
	Movie_12.gif	11-Dec-1999 17:59	72K
	flickframe.class	13-Dec-1999 16:07	830
	fliplay.class	13-Dec-1999 16:07	12K
	last24.old.fli.zip	13-Mar-2002 00:59	2.5M
	rawframes/	06-Jan-2006 05:10	-