[Motmot] .fmf conversion information

[John Bender]

At some point, I wrote some fmf readers for Matlab, which would then
allow you to do arbitrary things to the data (including write to AVI
using the built-ins). I don't know where that code is currently;
possibly Andrew does? I also remember an fmf2avi.py script in the
subversion repository some time ago, which I think Andrew wrote and
presumably knows the fate of.

JB

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Andrew Straw <astraw at caltech.edu> wrote:
> John Schneider wrote:
>> Hi Andrew
>>
>> Thanks for the wire diagrams!
>> Although we hate to be the ones who keep asking for more, we have
>> another request (that has hopefully already been solved):
>
> No worries! No problem asking -- I do hope for this software to gain a
> general level of usefulness, and there is nothing like having a user
> base request features to attain that...
>
> do you have
>> a program (GUI or command line) to split .fmf files?
>
> Yes, use the playfmf program and go to "File->export smaller movie".
> Then adjust the start and stop frame accordingly.
>
> Or is there a way
>> to register .fmf with ffmpeg?
>
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but you can use the fmfcat
> program to pipe the movie to ffmpeg. Type "fmfcat" without arguments for
> a brief help/usage statement. (I can see that adding start/stop frame
> arguments might be very useful here.... Let me know if that would really
> help you, as this would take only 5 minutes to implement.) The trouble
> with fmfcat is that sometimes there's some kind of weird pipe issue I
> haven't figured out, so I have to retry by hand until it works or first
> pipe to a file. Piping to a file would be done like this:
>
> fmfcat my_cool_movie.fmf > my_cool_movie.tmp
> cat my_cool_movie.tmp | ffmpeg -vcodec msmpeg4vs -i - my_cool_movie.avi
> rm my_cool_movie.tmp
>
> The downside is that my_cool_movie.tmp can be huge. Thus I have
> attempted to automate retrying on error with a bash script like the
> following. If you save this script "save_as_avi.sh" and then make the
> script executable with "chmod a+x save_as_avi.sh", you can then run this
> with "./save_as_avi.sh my_cool_movie.fmf" which will then save the movie
> fromfmf.avi encoded with the msmpeg4v2 codec. (I think you have to
> install ffmpeg from the mediabuntu repository to get this codec. I think
> the mjpeg codec should be available with the plain vanilla Ubuntu
> version of ffmpeg.)
>
> #!/bin/bash
> FAIL=1
>
> while [ $FAIL -ne 0 ]
> do
>    sleep 1
>    echo "trying"
>    fmfcat $1 | ffmpeg -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -i - -y fromfmf.avi
>    FAIL=$?
>    echo "FAIL=$FAIL"
> done
> echo "done"
>
> --
> Andrew D. Straw, Ph.D.
> California Institute of Technology
> http://www.its.caltech.edu/~astraw/
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