catframes 2024.8.1

Video glue for image folders.

Catframes

It concatenates frames.

With this software, you can

• create a timelapse video
• turn an animation rendered in a PNG sequence into a video
• compress your selfies
• compress a sequence of frames from CCTV

The script takes folders with images and outputs MP4 or WebM.

It has GUI: catmanager

What exactly does it do

1. It takes the folders in the order you specify them.
2. It sorts images by name in natural order in each folder separately.
3. It checks the resolution of each image and counts their numbers.
4. It heuristically chooses the video resolution from the collected data.
5. It resizes each image (on the fly) to fit into that resolution, preserving the aspect ratio and aligning the images in the center.
6. It overlays various text information on the frames, if you specified this in the arguments.
7. It concatenates the frames, having a fairly high resistance to emergencies.

Installation

Do this as root for system-wide installation:

python3 -m pip install catframes

You can also copy catframes.py to /usr/local/bin manually. But then you will also need to install Pillow.

Dependencies that are not installable from PYPI:

1. FFmpeg
2. Monospaced fonts

Alpine: apk add ffmpeg font-dejavu

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

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

Windows: FFmpeg builds; Courier New included.

Usage

If you are launching the program for the first time, use --limit option to try different options on short video samples.

catframes --limit=3 sourceFolder sample.mp4

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.), it's better to add --force and --sure options:

catframes -sf 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.

One of the cells may 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, outdated)