Making a time-lapse in Debian

Make a script like this called “save”. Make it executable.

#!/bin/sh ct=0 if [ -f "ct" ]; then ct=`cat ct` fi ct=`expr $ct + 1` mv snap.jpg snap-$ct.jpg echo $ct > ct

Run “uvccapture -x648 -y480 -c./save -t20” to take a photo every 20 seconds.

Then you can use a script like this to continually re-encode it and send it to your webserver: #!/bin/sh while true do rm out.mpg cat snap-*.jpg | ./ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 1 -r 20 -vcodec mjpeg -i - out.mpg scp out.mpg [email protected]:nella.org/jra/geek/3d done

You can get ffmpeg from here, and not deal with all the problems of library compatibility, if “apt-get install ffmpeg” doesn’t just work.