Today it was a lazy evening: no productive hacking, no deeper technical discussions, no email answer sessions, no peer reviews, nothing—just passive reading and … command-line video editing—vacation for the brain.

Sometimes I am to cushy to use my camcorder or my EOS 7D to make a film. Instead I use my handy Canon IXUS and shoot some pictures, one after another. Later on at home I use mencoder to stick these single frames together, add some music and voilà.

Mencoder is a command line tool and I use the following options to generate the movie. After same experience with vimeo I think these settings are suitable. But hey, I am no multimedia guru … ;-)

opt="vbitrate=2160000:mbd=2:keyint=132:vqblur=1.0:cmp=2:subcmp=2:dia=2:mv0:last_pred=3" 
mencoder mf://\*.JPG -mf w=1920:h=1440:fps=1.5:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vpass=1:$opt -oac copy -o /dev/null
mencoder mf://\*.JPG -mf w=1920:h=1440:fps=1.5:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vpass=2:$opt -oac copy -o output.avi

# add an mp3
mencoder output.avi -o out.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -audiofile ~/travel.mp3

# generate index, this enables the possibility to play the video without waiting
# until the video is fully loaded - vimeo requires this
mencoder -idx out.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o final.avi 

The created video can be found on vimeo: Thailand Climbing Trip – 2010

It is already 3am, time to go to bed.