So our Christmas cactus is actually pooting out flowers this year and I thought it'd be neat to do a time-lapse video showing a blossom opening up. Lashed up a Logitech Quickcam to the Dell E1405 laptop (Kubuntu 7.10 & Win XP MCE) and started looking for a Linux time-lapse program.
I found Videodog, a command-line V4L-compatible utility to take single images, and Transcode, which can stitch JPGs into an MPEG-4 AVI. Works OK, although Videodog is what might be called a mature program and is rather thin on creature comforts. It would be -really- nice to find a program that did automatic exposure settings... The real problem is that videodog (or the underlying V4L or USB or something) rather frequently crashes the system hard: everything's dead except for the scroll-lock and num-lock LEDs, which are blinking slowly and steadily. Keyboard's dead, can't ssh in to restart the box, the only way out is hold the power button down to force it off. Drat! The screen is either blank (due to the backlight powering off before the crash as it's supposed to do) or simply frozen with a dead cursor (if the screensaver / power off hasn't kicked in yet). No debugging info to be seen. Mr Google sez the LEDs are the visible symptom of a kernel panic, but isn't helpful on What To Do Afterwards. Fairly obviously, I'm nowhere near good enough to debug this stuff on my own, but I'd like to pass some evidence to somebody who is, in the hope of getting a fix. How does one get evidence out of a hard crash and who's the right person / group to debug something like that? Alternatively, is there a better / less obsolete / more stable time-lapse video capture program that I simply haven't been able to find? Thanks... -- Ed _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Oct 3 - Security and Privacy Nov 7 - Django Python Application Framework
