How to programmatically create videos?

Question

Is there a freely available library to create a MPEG (or any other simple video format) out of an image sequence ?

It must run on Linux too, and ideally have Python bindings.

Hallowmas

Answer 1

I know there's mencoder (part of the mplayer project), and ffmpeg, which both can do this.

Sabella

Answer 2

ffmpeg is a great (open source) program for building all kinds of video, and converting one type of video (a sequence of images in this case) into other types of video.

Usually it is utilized from the command line, but that is really just a wrapper around its internal libraries. It is expressly available to be used from within another program.

There are also python bindings that wrap the c api, though this particular project doesn't seem to be getting the best support (there are probably other projects out there doing the same thing).

There's also this link where someone has used ffmpeg to do something similar to what you're looking for.

Owing

Answer 3

GStreamer is a popular choice. It's a full multimedia framework much like DirectShow or QuickTime, has the advantage of having legally licensed codecs available, and has excellent Python bindings.

Endear

Answer 4

in c++ OpenCV (open source Computer Vision library from Intel) let you create an AVI file and just push frames inside...

but it's like shooting with a cannon to a fly.

Wandy

Answer 5

Not a library, but mplayer has the ability to encode JPEG sequences to any kind of format. It runs on Linux, Windows, BSD and other platforms and you can write a python script if you want to use it with python.

Guevara

Answer 6

ffmpeg has an API and also python bindings, seems to be the way to go !

Thanks

Hallowmas

Answer 7

ffmpeg minimal runnable C example

I have provided a full runnable example at: How to resize a picture using ffmpeg's sws_scale()?

Hypnotic