Video Contact Sheet *NIX
aka vcs

Projects index

Index

1. Details (and download)
2. Updates / WiP
3. Description
   • Notes
4. Default behaviour
5. Documentation
6. Some samples
7. Known issues
8. Next version futures
9. Similar tools
10. ChangeLog

Details

• Current version: 1.11.1, released on March 10th 2010. Get [plain text] [gz] [bz2] [deb (all arches)] [rpm (all arches)] [Arch Linux PKGBUILD]
• Status: Stable (some bugs granted of course) on both Linux and FreeBSD.
  Alpha/who knows in any other OS. Some rarely used options are barely tested.
  1.11 changed a lot so it might be less stable than I think.
• Released under the terms of the GNU LGPL.
• To track new releases, take a look at its freshmeat page.
• Requirements (most desktops should have all, or most, of them): ImageMagick (at least version 6.3.5-7) (convert, montage and identify commands), mplayer or FFmpeg (preferably both), and some common stuff available on most sane desktops: bash (supported ≥v2.05b), sed, grep/egrep, getopt and cut.
  DVD support (optional) requires lsdvd and perl.
• Slightly buggy :P

Updates / WiP

Important I forgot to add warnings about this in 1.11 (1.11.1 fixes this): If you're using a configuration file, there's been some renamings: DEFAULT_NUMCAPS is now numcaps, DEFAULT_INTERVAL is now interval and DEFAULT_COLS is now cols.

Since March 16th 2009 status updates are posted at my main site, see http://outlyer.net/etiq/projects/vcs/ (previous updates are also there).

Description

This is a bash script meant to create video contact sheets (previews) of videos. Any video supported by mplayer and ffmpeg can be used.
A note of warning: Unlike most similar tools it, by default, makes screenshots the same size as the video, see below for details on how to change this.

Currently it's in beta status, it works quite well but has a handful of annoying quirks, I'll try to fix as much of it I can though.
Any contribution, suggestion or bug report is welcome.

Take a look at the documentation and/or use the --help and --fullhelp options to learn how to use it.

Notes

• Using -i or -n with values that lead to the same number of vidcaps doesn't necessarily yield exactly the same vidcaps, you'll have to play with them for best results.
  Example: With a video that lasts for 22min 14secs, -n 6 will create the six vidcaps:
  3:22, 6:44, 10:04, 13:28, 16:50 and 20:12, while -i 3m will create
  3:00, 6:00, 9:00, 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00.
  As you can see, -n distributes the vidcaps all over the video while -i N starts at N and goes in increments of it up to the end.
• You can set the aspect ratio of the video with -a. It is only required for anamorphic material and discouraged for the rest.
  It can take either a floating point number (like 1.33 or 1.778) or a fraction (like 4/3 or 16/9). The latter is slightly preferable.

Default behaviour

By using configuration files and/or command line options the default behaviour can be tweaked to your needs, this are the defaults, followed by a link with the explanation on how to change it:

• Captures are made every 5 minutes. See Basic usage.
• Captures are the same size as the input video. See Size and aspect ratio.
• Captures are arranged in 2 columns (if there's more than one capture). See Number of columns.
• Captures over all the video, hence might show too much credits or spoil the end. See Restrict to a section of the video.

Documentation

Documentation has been moved to a separate set of pages.

Some samples

Samples with varied options:

More samples can be found in the documentation site, e.g. in: Samples, Example configurations, Setting colours

Known Issues

Getting stuck on first frame

This happening is a sign that the decoder (FFmpeg or MPlayer) has problems dealing with the input file. Interrupt with CTRL+C and re-run with -O stderr=/dev/stderr to display decoder errors. It might be due to unsupported codecs or broken files, there's little more you can do, except trying with the other decoder (-M to use MPlayer, -F to use FFmpeg, which is the default).

Getting gray frames

This is a decoder error (either due to a broken file or some codec bug). Again little to be done other than switching decoders.

Remember this is a (neverending) work in progress, please report any bugs you encounter, either through e-mail or the bug tracker.

Next version features

See roadmap.

Similar tools

Other similar tools available for POSIX/UNIX-like systems:

• make_caps.sh
• SlickSlice
• movie thumbnailer (mtn) (mtn is not a script but an actual program so it has higher chances to work where scripts fails)

ChangeLog

These are the changes since the last full version of some interest to end users.
Also available is a selection of changes of all versions at the wiki; and the full changelog is in a separate file (CHANGELOG or CHANGELOG.gz). (Contributors are listed there too.)

1.11.1 (Published March 11th 2010)

• FLV1 codec name
• A couple bugfixes: Warn (but accept) about deprecated options in use in the configuration file, and a more portable way to detect ImageMagick's version

1.11 (Published March 7th 2010)

• Fix/Workarounds for failure on last capture
• Height can be defined as a percentage (-H 25%) or set configuration files (th_height=160)
• Output filename can now be set manually (-o file)
• Lots of small cosmetic tweaks, from default font and heading background, to tighter padding or smaller timestamps. And the ability to tweak or disable padding.
• Support for DVD has been revamped and should work much better now.
• FreeBSD users are now (mostly) first class citizens for vcs ;-)
• More concise --help output, added --fullhelp for the whole bore
• Handling of non-latin filenames makes a lot more sense now
• The usual lot of bugfixes, better detection of video features, better aspect ratio detection, new codec names, etc.
• And more