jarrin - Time Lapser

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Time Lapser

Time Lapser's Entire Interface

This past weekend I built a deck. I wanted to set up a webcam and do a time capture of the process so I got all the hardware set up and installed and set up some random piece of shitware called CaptureMax. After wrestling with it for a while I got it to capture video files so I got my tools out and started working on the deck. Later that evening I returned to my webcam set up and discovered that CaptureMax had only recorded the first 45 mintues (because it was "shareware").

Out of frustration I decided to build my own stream-lined capture program which turned out to be quite easy after I found a quick little example program on the internet somewhere. A couple hours later I had the perfectly functional Time Lapser finished. I set it up with the webcam on my laptop and set it to capture an image every twenty seconds. I then forgot about it for nearly fourty-eight hours! When I realized I'd left it running I found it happily capturing images just as I had told it to two days earlier. I'd call that a pretty good initial run.

The executable (and one DLL) is only 52k (but you will need to have the Microsoft .NET framework (v1.1) installed in order to make it go). It worked just fine with Andy's few-years-old cheapy Creative USB webcam. YMMV. Share and enjoy!

Requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (v1.1)

Version 1.1 (06Oct8)
I tweaked it out a little bit this afternoon. Added a context menu to the display ("Always On | Off | Display Last Capture"). Added some versioning information. Fixed the resizing (double click on the display screen to resize to the last selected size). Cleaned up the source a bit.

Time Lapser v1.1

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JPG to AVI

I tried to use another piece of shitware called BMP2AVI to render all of my captured pics into a video file only to discover, a couple hours later, that the shareware version plasters "REGISTER NOW!" all over the video file. I guess my next project will be to write a too that compiles a folder of JPGs into a video file. ~~Anyone have any suggestions on how to do that?~~ (UPDATE: I did just that.)

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