[geeks] Scriptable Video Processing

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 10:51:36AM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Joshua Boyd wrote:
> > Well, for a few seconds of video, it shouldn't be a back breaker to
> > convert the clip to sequential frames (scriptable with mplayer), then
> > have a shell script extract the frames you want.  
> > 
> > However, the %difference stuff is something you'd have to write actual
> > code for (at least I don't know of anything available to do it for
> > free).
> 
> Gimp?  It has an animation optimizer, and I believe it can write MPEG.

Erm, I don't believe that the original poster expressed any interest in
writing video, only in reading video and producing a reduced amount of
still frames.

And would you mind explaining what the animation optimizer is supposed
to do?  Googling for gimp animation optimizer returns only the source
code, foreign language pages, and a link to something awful that would
require me to create a login first to view.

Looking through the source code, it looks like it is made to optimize a
sequence for best gif animation compression.  It doesn't actually spit
out % difference values at all in a way that the original poster could
use in a script.