The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/irresponsiblehippo on 2024-10-13 04:11:59.

I’ve started compressing my trail camera photos into videos with x264, using ffmpeg.

The results are really impressive in my opinion. A lot better than I would’ve guessed.

I took 8,825 10? megapixel jpegs and shrunk them down to 1080P. The quality is quite comparable, although of course there is some loss.

ffmpeg -r 60 -pattern_type glob -i '*.JPG' -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -preset fast -tune stillimage -crf 28 timelapse.mkv

$ du -s 2023-09-05-2024-02-28*
19163667        2023-09-05-2024-02-28
193889  2023-09-05-2024-02-28.mkv

Close to 1% of the original file size (18GB to 189MB). Seeking is faster. I can play slowly or quickly by changing the speed. Much faster than trying to “play” through jpegs on the fly. The video encoding was pretty fast, too.

Have any of you tried this before?