I needed to make a quick movie clip for my project the other day. I couldn't find one on the internet that suited me, so I decided to make my own. The clip I needed was a very simple short one. All I needed was a film style countdown movie clip.. you know 5..4..3..2..1..go. This can be easily done as a slideshow. I made and image with a 5 on it, one with a 4 on it, etc. I then named these images a.jpg, b.jpg, c.jpg, etc. in the order that I wanted them to appear in the slideshow. Next I ran the command

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=1 -o countdown.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

in the directory with all of the jpeg images. Very quickly, the command returned and I had a nice movie named countdown.avi. The movie is surprisingly small. The mpeg4 compression algorithm takes advantage of the fact that the images are a rather static looking slideshow.

You could easily use this technique with some photos to make some kind of slideshow DVD or VCD for family or friends. Maybe you can use this as your next stocking stuffer Christmas present. With some tinkering and man page reading, I'm sure you could put your favorite music behind it as well.

One tip, I had to put two copies of the last frame in the directory. It seems to only blink the last frame right at the end of the movie. I guess this seems logical because you are telling it to put one second between each frame, but it's a little confusing when actually using it. Just make an extra copy of your last frame and you'll be fine.