Ten years ago I was experimenting with TimeSnapper Classic, a free utility for Windows that takes a screenshot every 5 seconds. The neat feature is it lets you view a timelapse of your day.
The screenshots were taking up a lot of disk space. I noticed that very little changed between pictures, so I started thinking of an algorithm that would make use of this characteristic: store only the changes between subsequent images. A few minutes in, I realized I was reinventing video compression!
So, I just used ffmpeg to turn the image sequence into a mp4. It was something like 95% reduction in file size. (I think I used ImageMagick to embed the timestamp filename into the images themselves, thus recreating basically all the features of TimeSnapper Classic with 2 commands.)
The screenshots were taking up a lot of disk space. I noticed that very little changed between pictures, so I started thinking of an algorithm that would make use of this characteristic: store only the changes between subsequent images. A few minutes in, I realized I was reinventing video compression!
So, I just used ffmpeg to turn the image sequence into a mp4. It was something like 95% reduction in file size. (I think I used ImageMagick to embed the timestamp filename into the images themselves, thus recreating basically all the features of TimeSnapper Classic with 2 commands.)