catframes 2024.3.0

A handy tool for combining images into videos via FFmpeg.

Catframes

A script that concatenates frames. FFmpeg wrapper.

With this software, you can, for example,

• create a timelapse video,
• turn an animation rendered in a PNG sequence into a video,
• or compress a sequence of frames from a surveillance camera using a video codec.

The script simply accepts folders with JPEG and PNG files as input and outputs MP4 or WebM.

Installation

From PyPI

I recommend to do it as root.

python3 -m pip install catframes

Installing dependencies:

Alpine: apk add ffmpeg font-dejavu

Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install ffmpeg fonts-dejavu

Centos/RHEL: yum install ffmpeg dejavu-sans-mono-fonts

Windows: Get FFmpeg Windows builds

From source (Linux, Unix-like)

Catframes is a script. Everything, including tests, is contained in a single file that you can upload to a system yourself.

cp catframes.py /usr/local/bin/
chmod 755       /usr/local/bin/catframes.py
ln -s /usr/local/bin/catframes.py /usr/local/bin/catframes

Installing dependencies: exactly the same, except for Pillow.

If you don't want to use pip, the library usually can be installed from operating system repository.

Alpine: apk add py3-pillow

Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install python3-pil

Centos/RHEL: yum install python3-pillow

It is better to run tests as a regular user.

python3 -m unittest discover /usr/local/bin/ -p catframes.py

From source (Windows)

0. You need Python3 to be available in cmd as python3.
1. Copy both catframes.py and catframes.bat to a folder (for instance, C:\Program Files\MyScripts).
2. Add this folder to PATH environment variable.
3. Install FFmpeg.
4. Add the folder, where ffmpeg.exe is installed, to the PATH environment variable.
5. Install Pillow.

You don't have to install fonts, because Windows already has Courier New.

You may install Pillow, using pip.

If you don't use pip for some reason, you may download Pillow *.whl file, corresponding to your Python version, unpack it and put PIL in your Python interpreter directory. This usually works. Files with whl extension are ordinary ZIP archives.

If everything is done, the following commands will work in any folder.

ffmpeg -version

catframes --help

You may run unit tests with the following line:

python3 -m unittest discover "C:\Program Files\MyScripts" -p catframes.py

Usage

Video encoding is a long process. If you are launching the program for the first time, a good way to try different options is to use --limit to make short video samples.

The command to run it with default settings looks like this:

catframes folderA folderB folderC result.webm

For automatic launches (through a CRON job, etc.), I recommend to add these options:

catframes -sf --port-range=10140:10240 folderA folderB folderC result.webm

Default settings

Frame rate: 30 frames per second.

You may change it with -r parameter. Acceptable values are from 1 to 60. All source frames will be included, so this parameter determines speed of your video record.

Compression quality: medium.

You may change it with -q parameter. Acceptable values are poor, medium, high.

Margin (background) color: black.

You may change it with --margin-color. It takes values in formats #rrggbb and #rgb (hexadecimal digits; #abc means #aabbcc).

Text overlays

There is a 3 by 3 grid. You can place labels in all cells except the central one.

Please, use --left, --right, --top, --left-top, etc.

Important: One of the cells must be reserved for important warnings. It is set by WARN value (in any case). By default, this is the top cell.

You can use any constant text in the labels, including line feeds (\n). You can also use a limited set of functions in curly brackets that output information about the source image or about the system.

To prevent special characters from being interpreted, you should use single quotes in Unix Shell, however, you must use double quotes in the Windows command line.

Example (Bash):

catframes \
    -r=5 --limit=10 \
    --left-top='Frame {frame:video}' \
    --left-bottom='{dir}/{fn}\n\nModified: {mtime}' \
    --right-bottom='Compressed {vtime:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M}' \
    folder video.webm

Read more about these functions in the docs.

See also

Documentation (in Russian)