Videos back – Oh the Scripting – Chance of flurries on Saturday.

We finally broke our streak of foggy days yesterday!

And I even have proof thanks to the image archives and now videos added to the Webcam page.

After working out a few bugs from the first time I implemented it last month, Ive now re-activated the new video features on the webcam page.

The videos are updated everyday at 7AM for the 24hr and nighttime videos, and 7PM for the daytime videos. These videos are best viewed with QuickTime. You can either click on them and play them in your web browser, or right click on them and save them to your computer.

The videos are generated automatically on my Mac Mini in my living room :). They use a Unix bash script that takes the webcam images and gathers them into folders for their 12hr or 24hr period and then runs them through QuickTime (via AppleScript) to generate the movie and finally uploads them to the appropriate folder on my web server. The 12hr videos are around 30MB each, and the 24hr videos are 64MB.

The webcam pictures themselves are also captured on my MacMini via an extended USB/Ethernet cable running from our upstairs bedroom to the main floor living room.

All of the images are browsable by clicking the See Image Archive link on the Webcams page. My Canon G6 captures 1440 images a day taking up 430MB of space (and that’s not anywhere near full quality and resolution for the camera) That’s over 520,000 images a year and 150GB of space.

The hardest part about the webcam processing is the dates and times. Timezones, universal time, unix time, daylight saving stime… it’s all a real process to get it to all work properly and bug free.

Next I’m going to investigate a way to input a soundtrack into the videos.

And oh ya, about the weather! :). It will be cold again tonight. There is a chance of flurries on Saturday. And Tuesday now too. Looks like some sort of active weather the week before Christmas, green or white remains to be seen.

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