This escaped my attention, but a user by the name of tudo75 left a comment mentioning they have created a cool GUI for vcs, in case you want to check it out. I haven't checked it thoroughly but it seems useful.
vcs-creator, Small gui for the VCS (Video Contact Sheet *NIX) script: https://github.com/tudo75/vcs-creator
Prompted by a couple reports, here's a new bugfix release of VCS. It most importantly fixes an incompatibility with Bash 5.0 which made the script put all the captures in a single row.
A couple minor bugs are also fixed, where using mawk would produce some errors and print the wrong file sizes, and the evasion offsets (which are used to avoid blank screengrabs) weren't really being used.
See the full changelog for more details.
The latest version of VCS is available to download.
It's been a good while since the last release, but there aren't a lot of changes this time around, apart from the usual bugfixes there's better handling of errors and unsupported files.
The most important bug fixed is obviously the one I already previewed some days ago. The header was being cropped with current-day ImageMagick, and that problem should be gone.
See the full changelog for more details.
Just a quick note for those encountering this bug where the codec information is misaligned and cropped, you can download a pre-release of the next version now. There's a couple more bugfixes and minor changes, and hopefully not much breakage.
This issue has been there for months (first pointed out, together with the fix, by Markus), but I haven't gotten the time to look into it until now, sorry to anyone affected.
You can grab the script from https://p.outlyer.net/vcs/files/pre-RELEASES/vcs-1.13.3-pre.2.bash.
For anyone interested, Thomas has contacted me to let me know he wrote a "Video Contact Sheet Ruby" which reuses part of VCS' code and outputs contact sheets in the same style.
Being written in Ruby, its code will be less of a mess and, even more interestingly, it can run on Windows with less hackery than VCS.
So you're invited to take a look at his project at https://github.com/FreeApophis/vcs.rb.
A new update of VCS with a couple bugfixes is available to download. Once again, if you had problems with the previous versions there's nothing new.
It fixes a bug when using MPlayer as capturer that could produce one more capture than expected. Thanks to Miya for reporting it.
See the full changelog for more details.
A minor update of vcs is available to download. In short, if you don't use Arch and you had no problems running it there's no need to update.
It fixes an uncommon bug and updates the build script for Arch Linux. Thanks to Eris Belew for reporting these.
See the full changelog for more details.
An updated version of vcs is available to download. Shame on me for the long wait since this has been pretty much completed for months.
The biggest change this time is the "blank frame avoidance" feature, with which (mostly) blank frames will not be captured, if possible, this is one of the cool features found in mtn and worth stealing 🙂
Also worth noting is the ability to load profiles automatically. E.g. adding "profiles=white,mosaic" to your ~/.vcs.conf file will use both profiles. A new profile ("compact") is added, and a list of installed profiles can be obtained with
The manual page is finished too.
Of course you'll have to download and install the full package instead of just the script to get the profiles and man page installed.
Other minor additions are the identification of captures from FRAPS and of course the usual batch of fixes and scheduled changes. FreeBSD users, and hopefully Mac OS X too though I can't check, can again use the script too.
Finally, please read «Features to be removed from VCS» if you have any interest in VCS' future versions.
See the full changelog for more details.
There's some features in vcs I plan to remove to ease working on it's absurdly big code. I haven't seen them used in the wild except long ago, plus in my samples and manuals by others. I'm calling for your opinion, however, to know for sure if I should actually remove them or not. Use the comments section below or, preferably, email me at outlyer@gmail.com.
Features marked for deletion:
I haven't updated VCS in a while and somehow managed to keep this update ready but unreleased for months, so today I decided it was about time to get rid of it and be free to work on 1.13 😛
This is a minor update with a couple bugfixes, but most importantly, it marks the switch to bash 3; this means a lot of small changes to the code so you should update to 1.12.3 to test if it works correctly before I release future versions (eventually 🙂 with much more important changes.
Changes (excerpt):
or
http://p.outlyer.net/vcs/files/vcs-1.12.3.tar.gz (script, sample configuration, manpage and profiles)