Today it was a lazy evening: no productive hacking, no deeper technical discussions, no email answer sessions, no peer reviews, nothing -- just passive reading and ... command-line video editing -- vacation for the brain.

Sometimes I am to cushy to use my camcorder or my "EOS 7D":http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canoneos7d/ to make a film. Instead I use my handy "Canon IXUS":http://www.canon.co.uk/for_home/product_finder/cameras/digital_camera/ixus/digital_ixus_100_is/index.asp and shoot some pictures, one after another. Later on at home I use "mencoder":http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ to stick these single frames together, add some music and voilà.

"Mencoder":http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ is a command line tool and I use the following options to generate the movie. After same experience with "vimeo":http://www.vimeo.com/ I think these settings are suitable. But hey, I am no multimedia guru ... ;-)

<pre> opt="vbitrate=2160000:mbd=2:keyint=132:vqblur=1.0:cmp=2:subcmp=2:dia=2:mv0:last_pred=3" mencoder mf://*.JPG -mf w=1920:h=1440:fps=1.5:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vpass=1:$opt -oac copy -o /dev/null mencoder mf://*.JPG -mf w=1920:h=1440:fps=1.5:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vpass=2:$opt -oac copy -o output.avi

# add an mp3 mencoder output.avi -o out.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -audiofile ~/travel.mp3

# generate index, this enables the possibility to play the video without waiting # until the video is fully loaded - vimeo requires this mencoder -idx out.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o final.avi </pre>

The created video can be found on vimeo: "Thailand Climbing Trip - 2010":http://vimeo.com/13719644

It is already 3am, time to go to bed.