articles tagged with video

My commute home from work last Tuesday. From Tottenham Court Road, heading west towards Notting Hill, via Mayfair, MarbleArch, Bayswater Road, Holland Park Road and then south towards Brook Green. Recorded with Hyperlapse at 6x regular speed for some added drama.

I’ve just released my first attempt at an Objective-C project, VideoSnap. It’s a simple OSX command line tool for recording video and audio from any attached QuickTime capture device.

VideoSnap was inspired by ImageSnap from @rharder, and I started working on it after finding problems with the older (carbon based) wacaw command (which no longer works with some of the latest Mac/OSX hardware). I hope to use VideoSnap in a new version of lolcommits, which i’m working on.

With VideoSnap you can specify which device to capture from, the duration, size/quality, a delay period (before capturing starts) and optionally turn off audio. The only required argument is a file path. By default VideoSnap will capture 6 seconds of video and audio from the default capture device in H.264(SD480)/AAC encoding to ‘movie.mov’. You can also use VideoSnap to list attached QuickTime capture devices by name.

VideoSnap is coded with Objective-C and uses the Cocoa and QTKit frameworks. It has been an interesting project so far and a great introduction to both Objective-C and Xcode. If you happen to give it a try, please let me know of any issues.

Microsoft’s Podtech Research Lab has also been experimenting with a different type of interface based around shape/motion tracking. It works with two hands as well, but without any tactile feedback for the user to ‘press against’. To be honest it looks like it would be very odd to use, as Jeff Han mentions, 3d manipulation of objects without tactile feedback is actually less intuitive and a step away from 2d multi-touch interfaces.