Webcam grabber

Small utility made for a friend, to grab images from a webcam off the web at a specific interval and convert these into a time-laspe video.

Features

• Grab preview image at given intervals
  • Detect and skip similar images
  • Detect and skip dark images
  • Honour daylight time using https://sunrise-sunset.org/
• Script to convert all images to video

grab_cam.py

This shell script grabs an image from an URL using wget at regular intervals. Most webcam accessible through a webpage has an url for a preview that is updated regularly, this is what is downloaded using this script.

Command line

usage: grab_cam.py [-h] [-l, --light LIGHT_PERCENT]
                [-d, --daylight DAYLIGHT DAYLIGHT]
                interval url target_dir

positional arguments:
interval              Interval betewwn grabs, in secends
url                   URL of the image
target_dir            Target directory

optional arguments:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
-l, --light LIGHT_PERCENT
                        Image are discarded below this B/W light level in
                        percent
-d, --daylight DAYLIGHT DAYLIGHT
                        Longetude and latitude to only grab during
                        astronomical daylight hours

to_video.sh

Convert all jpeg images in current directory to video.

to_video.sh fps extension output_filename

• fps: FPS of the video
• extension: Input image extension
• output_filename: Output video file name

Dependecies

Grabber

• Pillow
• BeautifulSoup

Installing (Debian like systems)

As root do:

apt-get install python3-bs4 python3-pil

Video converter

• mencoder

Installing (Debian like systems)

As root do:

apt-get install mencoder