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Synopsis

im2avi is a small program for making AVIs from sequences of images. It makes use of avifile[1] for encoding video streams, so im2avi has access to all the codecs that avifile supports, including e.g. DivX ;) or Cinepak. It uses the ImageMagick++[2] library to load the images, so it supports a wide range of formats. im2avi was developed on linux, but should run on most OSen that support avifile, ImageMagick and fltk.

im2avi adds value in offering an easy to use UI frontend to avifile and ImageMagick++. im2avi is distributed under the GPL v2 or later. See the file "GPL-2".

im2avi is available from http://cpbotha.net/im2avi.html.

Installation

Build and install avifile and ImageMagick++.
Build and install fltk-1.1.3[3] or later.
Modify the variables at the start of the im2avi Makefile to reflect your setup.
Now do: touch makedepend; make depend; make
Copy the resultant im2avi binary into a suitable location on you filesystem.

NOTE: on gcc3 you might get all kinds of warnings about deprecated headers. This is because I still develop on g++ 2.95 which doesn't have some of the headers that gcc3 recommends. In this case, you can try adding "using namespace std;" right after any #includes about which your gcc3 complains. Thanks to Christian Baumann for this tip!

NOTE: at least on avifile 0.7.29.200302004 on Debian Woody (with the packages from http://marillat.free.fr/) there is a conflict between the ffmpeg and divx4 plugins. It seems that if the ffmpeg.so plugin is installed, one can't make DIVX5s. To fix this, temporarily move the ffmpeg.so out of the way before starting im2avi (avifile will then use divx4.so instead).

Usage

Start im2avi.
Use the "Add" button to add images to the images list. Also make use of the top, up, down and bottom pictograms (hot keys: alt-t, alt-u, alt-d and alt-b) to move selected images. "Del" deletes all selected images. "Load" and "Save" can be used to store and retrieve the complete list of images.
Set the desired width and height. ALL INPUT IMAGES WILL BE SCALED TO THESE DIMENSIONS. Select an image and use "Auto" to enter its real width and height in the input boxes. The "% n" boxes show whether the width/height is divisible by "n": if the modulus is zero, the width/height is divisible by that "n". This is useful as some of the codecs require the width/height of the input images to be divisible by 4, 8 or 16. Experimentation will tell.
Now enter a filename for the output AVI, or use the file selection dialog by clicking on "Browse".
Select an AVI codec. If your avifile has been installed correctly and you've installed the windows DLLs that are available for download from the avifile website, you should have access to quite a range of codecs.
Select the desirable quality percentage, or leave it at its default.
Edit or leave frames per second as is.
Now do "Make AVI".

NOTES:

By dragging your mouse to the left or to the right over the width, height and frames per second input boxes, you can decrease or increase the values they contain. The increment changes depending on which mouse button you drag with. Obviously, you can also enter values directly.

Contacting the author

You can mail me at cpbotha at i triple e dot org.

References

[1] http://avifile.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.imagemagick.org/www/Magick++/ [3] http://www.fltk.org/software.php