Several new updates
23 August 2017
So, this latest update involves several new modules and some modifications to the code. First up, after uploading the video effects modules in the last update, I wanted a way to preview them out on the web as an animated GIF. I therefore made a quick module that does exactly that - it takes an incoming video stream and outputs it directly to an animated GIF file. Speed is pretty good, it does drop frames in between saving to disk, but I made it fairly resilient in that it'll calculate how many frames are dropped and use the correct amount of delay between each frame.
Of course, this then gave me my next headache - my HD video feeds are way too big to really be of any use as animated GIFs, even if they did work pretty well on my desktop. Well, I'd been meaning to write a video scaler module, so I mocked up a quick scaler with 1x, 0.75x, 0.5x and 0.25x scaling options and then uploaded that as my second brand new HECTOR module in one day.
This of course means I can now scale my HD video feeds down to one quarter of their original size before outputting to the video effects units, and then feed the output from those units through to an animated GIF generator - which gave me the following previews.
VideoEffects.BitCrusher, this time with the colours crushed a lot further:
It's worth noting that these were live television feeds, scaled on-the-fly and saved to disk in one operation, with no post-production work required on my part. The GIF dithering could have been done nicer, and I'll be looking into ways of improving that in the future, and of course also getting the frame rate up. But, on the whole, considering I coded up both these modules today in my spare time whilst also recovering from flu, I'm pretty happy with the result.
Did I mention I've got the flu? I've got the flu.