Simple frame grabber using IPWebcam Remote Camera (Android)

My son (and myself) both love trying to make stop-motion Lego movies but there is an absolute dearth of good free applications out there. I aim to remedy that with a cross-platform binary (under development) that uses D-lang and Vibe.d, this little utility was a proof of concept to get me into learning the libraries more and also to prove that I could actually grab an image from IPWebcam Remote.

Building it

Build the binary as shown, this is for OS X:

dmd -L/usr/lib/libcurl.dylib main.d

You may have to fiddle with that to work on other systems.

Once it is built, copy it somewhere that it can be found on the system file path, on my iMac that is:

$ sudo cp slomograb /usr/local/bin/slomograb

Using it.

Having copied it on the path, you should then run IPCamera and note the address it gives you: for me that usually turns out to be something like: http://192.168.0.8:8080, you can then do:

$ slomograb 192.168.0.8:8080

This will take a high-resolution picture using the settings you have in effect and save it in the current working directory. The filename will be fNNNNNNNN.jpg and it will automatically find the largest of frames before saving it. Each invocation produces a higer frame:

f00000001.jpg
f00000002.jpg
f00000003.jpg
  :

What you do with it after that is up to you, I use ffmpeg to stitch them together into the final sequence for now and then the clip is imported into iMovie for editing. The script "stitch" is also in this project and shows how to use ffmpeg to do just that, again on OSX. Again, copy stitch into a place like usr/local/bin so it can be run from anywhere.

Working Practice

For each sequence / scene you are going to shoot, create a folder called "scene_NAME", then I "cd" into that and get ready for a shoot... when everything is ready, issue the command to grab a frame, rinse and repeat.

At any time you can just use the "stitch" command and then watch it, I do it like this:

 $ stitch && open clip.mp4

Which on my Mac will glue them and then open Quicktime for playback.

So, there we have it, the beginnings of a simple stop-motion tool chain that is in theory at least, cross platform thanks to the power of D-lang.