Video Contact Sheet *NIX

Video Contact Sheet *NIX or VCS for short is an open source and freely distributed command-line software, a Bash script that has been designed from the offset to allow users to easily and quickly create contact sheets (also known as previews) of a video file.

Takes still captures at specific intervals of time

The software is engineered in such a way that it will take still captures of the selected video file at specific intervals of time. Beside the still images, the output will also include useful information about the respective video file.

Displays detailed information about the video file

The video information displayed on the contact sheets may include the size of the video file, the actual video resolution, the codecs used to encode the file, the frame rate, as well as the total length of the video file.

Supports almost any video file type

Being backed by the powerful FFmpeg and MPlayer software projects, Video Contact Sheet *NIX will support almost any video file type, or at least all the video file types that are supported by FFmpeg and MPlayer.

Requires no installation

Video Contact Sheet *NIX requires no installation, therefore all you have to do in order to get started with it, is to download the latest release from Softoware or its official website (see the homepage link at the end of the review), save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it, open a terminal emulator, navigate to your Home dir (e.g. cd /home/softoware) and run ‘./vcs-1.13.2’ command (this will change when the software will be updated).

Runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other UNIXes

Video Contact Sheet *NIX is a cross-platform software. It doesn’t work only on GNU/Linux operating systems, but as well as on BSD distributions, as well as other POSIX operating systems.

What is new in this release:

• Fix for sheets with MPlayer as capturer containing one extra capture.

What is new in version 1.13:

• Blank frame avoidance
• Automatic profile loading from configuration
• New 'compact' profile
• Bugfix: FreeBSD support restored
• Other fixes

What is new in version 1.12.3:

• This version actually handles --ffmpeg and --mplayer.
• It has correct parsing of -U. Switched to a minimum of bash 3.1.
• Avoids re-capturing the same frame twice; Uses getent instead of /etc/passwd when available.
• It will not use mplayer's length as a ceiling for timecode removal.

What is new in version 1.12.2:

• Profiles
• On-demand loading of custom configuration files
• Heading, footer and title based on actual font size
• Configuration generation from the command-line
• Relative end-offset
• Reworked command-line to capture from DVD
• Configuration syntax enhancements and more sensible names for settings
• Other fixes

What is new in version 1.12:

• Profiles
• On-demand loading of custom configuration files
• Heading, footer and title based on actual font size
• Configuration generation from the command-line
• Relative end-offset
• Reworked command-line to capture from DVD
• Configuration syntax enhancements and more sensible names for settings
• Other fixes

What is new in version 1.11.2:

• Added Cook and Sipro (RealAudio 4, 5 & 6) codecs
• BUGFIXES:
• Remove extra, empty, temporary dir
• Use standard awk syntax for exponentiation (pyth_th)
• Workaround for systems that don't register fonts with ImageMagick
• DEBUG: Print to stderr when probbing with mplayer too

What is new in version 1.11.1:

• Added FLV1 codec
• BUGFIXES:
• Deprecate DEFAULT_INTERVAL, DEFAULT_NUMCAPS and DEFAULT_COLS as
• overrides, warn about their new names (interval, numcaps and cols)
• Fix ImageMagick version detection

What is new in version 1.11:

• Fix/Workarounds for failure on last capture
• Height can be defined as a percentage (-H 25%) or set configuration files (th_height=160)
• Output filename can now be set manually (-o file)
• Lots of small cosmetic tweaks, from default font and heading background, to tighter padding or smaller timestamps. And the ability to tweak or disable padding.
• Support for DVD has been revamped and should work much better now.
• FreeBSD users are now (mostly) first class citizens for vcs ;-)
• More concise --help output, added --fullhelp for the whole bore
• Handling of non-latin filenames makes a lot more sense now
• And last but not least, the usual lot of bugfixes, better detection of video features, better aspect ratio detection, new codec names, etc.

What is new in version 1.0.99:

• Experimental support for DVDs (-V).
• JPEG 2000 output format (-j2).
• Polaroid mode has been renamed to photos mode, and polaroid and polaroidframe modes have been introduced.
• There are slight adjustments in the timestamp size based on capture size.
• There is better detection of video frame rate (no more 1.000 FPS, in theory) and audio channels number by using ffmpeg.
• Overlap mode putting all images on the same location (possibly only with newer versions of ImageMagick) has been fixed.

Requirements:

• MPlayer
• ImageMagick
• FFmpeg
• bc
• sed
• grep
• mktemp
• GNU Bash