planetwater

I just had the problem to convert a fairly big number of png files into a movie. It turns out, the solution on a mac is fairly easy.

1. convert the png’s to jpg. This step seems necessary — I couldn’t get the movie to work with png’s. I’ve done it under OSX comfortably with a fairly simple automator workflow:

   • get specified finder items
   • copy finder items
   • change type of images
   • make finder item names sequential

2. download and install mencoder. All I ended up doing is downloading these two executable files and copying them into /usr/bin

3. the all you need to do is go into the directory where your jpgs are and execute

   mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -o movie.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg
   

The original suggestion I found here. Some more suggestions here. I played a bit with the framerate -ofps (see manpages). Here’s the wikipedia page. Here’s a video encoding wiki.

update Monday; June 24, 2013: scaling, cropping and compression can work like this

mencoder -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-700000 -vf scale=480:-2,crop=480:208

• @seismotom I'd be happy to talk #Python How much feedback have you gotten so far? in reply to seismotom #

• "Running the Numbers" exhibit http://ke-we.net/6rv in Berkeley is great visualization of stats/data by http://ke-we.net/6rw (via @cbdawson) #
• TAZ titles today on #water #privatization in #Berlin http://ke-we.net/6m7 and puts the contracts online: http://ke-we.net/6m8 #
• Stories and #Statistics http://ke-we.net/6lc #
• three gorges #dam almost full for first time: http://ke-we.net/6gx #

The city of Berlin has some of the highest prices for drinking water in Germany. In the last decade, water prices in Berlin have risen twice as much compared to the German average. People who felt they paid too much suspected that the high prices were related to the fact that Berlin’s drinking water infrastructure was privatized in the late 1990’s. Since then, the two involved companies RWE and Veolia made 1.3 Billion Euros profit!

Part of the problem was that the content of some of the contracts between the city who has a monopoly on supplying drinking water and RWE / Veolia, were not known to anyone other to the two parties. Some groups, like the “Berliner Wassertisch” have been campaigning to make those contracts publicly available. Planetwater.org mentioned in January 2008 Berlin’s water problem. This saturday, the Berlin-based newspaper, “die TAZ”, made those contracts public. Most notably, these contracts contained information on how the two parties had made sure that there could be profits — despite the fact that an open contract allowing profits had earlier been judged to be illegal.

A. Loiser points out in his article: “the Berlin example shows how companies are allowed to make huge, almost deliberately high, profits to the detriment of the citizens” (TAZ, 30./31. Oktober 2010, pages 16-17). It’s not the case that there was not enough water available, nor that the available water was excessively contaminated — both scenarios would lead to increased costs. Neither was the water distribution excessively difficult and expensive.

Research by Sebastian Heiser shows (article, xls sheet), how not only the profit rose, but costs for employees as well as costs for investments diminished between 1999 and 2009.

Most politicians involved with Stuttgart 21 now agree that the public has not been included sufficiently in the decision process for the project. Hence, the arbitration led by Heiner Geisler is broadcast publicly via internet and on TV. It remains to be seen if this leads to more data being publicly available.