Category Archives: video

Visualizing mpeg4 motion compensation vectors using mplayer 2

The MPEG4 video encoding process makes use of block motion compensation to achieve compression. The motion compensation process serves to produce the intra frames which are the frames between keyframes. I’ve always been fascinated by this process and was delighted to find out that my favorite video player, mplayer, allows one to visualize this process. [...]

Creating video thumbnails using ffmpeg 24

Generating thumbnails/screenshots of a video is useful in many ways. Youtube and many other video sites use this to show a preview of the video as a small thumbnail. Google video captures a series of thumbnails from a video at various time intervals to show a better video preview.

Watching Television on Linux: setting up a TV Tuner card 31

A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of the shops, I found a [...]