Monday, December 19, 2011

Virgin Media Netgear VMDG280 Wireless Connection Problems

I was having very annoying wireless connection issues with Virgin's Netgear VMDG280. Most devices would be fine, but the odd one would connect and have wireless access for a few seconds, but then the wireless connection would die, though the device would still report that it was connected. Restarting everything/anything would just repeat the same. Last night I tried reducing the maximum connection speed of the router from 300Mbps to 54Mbps, which seemed to solve the issue completely. I've since put it up to 145Mbps which seems like a happy medium.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Time Lapse with ffmpeg

Because I do it too infrequently to remember, here's how to put together time lapse/stop motion/animation with ffmpeg.

Firstly renumber you images*. Make sure that this script won't overwrite anything.

x=1; for i in *.JPG; do counter=$(printf %04d $x); mv "$i" img"$counter".JPG; x=$(($x+1)); done

Then put the images together.

ffmpeg -ss 1 -t 70 -i music.mp3 -r 15 -i img%04d.JPG -b 15M -s 1440x1080 out.avi

The ffmpeg documentation mentions using the "image file demuxer" -f image2 before the input image file name template, but I haven't found that necessary.

Remember that ffmpeg options act on the next input or output, so for example you can set the frame rate of the animation by using -r x before the input image parameter or set the frame rate of the resultant video by using the same switch before the output filename.

In the above example we also add a sound track, starting 1 second into the track and cut after 70 seconds.

* You're images must be numbered sequentially starting at 1.