I’ve been working on my time lapse tool for ludum dare for quite a while now. As usual, feature creep became a feature stampede. What started as just synched screen and webcam captures has become a moderately well featured time lapse suite for windows (sorry, I couldn’t find a cross platform webcam lib). I’ll make a complete post and new project page when it is finished.

This post, however, is to help out anyone who ran into the same problem I did with MEncoder. First of all, MEncoder is part of the MPlayer project, and both are incredible pieces of software. If you haven’t looked at them before and do anything with encoding/ripping/using video and sound, go check it out.

After my python solution for encoding movies from a bunch of images fell through, I decided I would just use MEncoder instead. While the docs are insane, this is obviously a problem others have tackled before and I quickly found the long command option for it). However, I did run into some interesting behavior. When MEncode is run from the directory of the image files, everything works. When it is run from a different directory, it still finds the files, counts them up, then hangs and crashes. I have no idea why this happens. I googled and found some other people running into it, but didn’t see any solutions using mencoder itself.

So, captain obvious gave me a hint, and I just use python to change the current working directory (os.chdir) to the image folder, tweaked my mencoder command a bit, and it works. A hack to be sure, but if you’re running into this problem, try that first if you can.