Hi.

I play with a nice toy called Gource. It’s an aplication to generate animations, more or less organic, about the life of a project. It’s the same that Codeswarm, althought Codeswarm is focused to developer and the generated animations seems as fireworks instead the Gource’s animation that seems to be a plant growth.

Well, the steps (there are in the wiki the same information but this is a summary.) to generate animation video are:

  • Install software: download from download project page, execute to cmake for generate the Makefile. And finally type make 😉 .
  • Convert SVN to GIT: You must install git-svn plugin (as apt-get install git-svn), and before you type “git svn init –stdlayout https://pandora.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pandora repo.git” for pandora SVN for example. This operation is for small time, but the next command “git svn fetch” is slow, it’s running one hour at least.
  • Execute Gource and generate AVI Simply type “./gource -800×600 repo.git/ –max-files 99999 –disable-progress –stop-at-end -s 0.25 –user-scale 2 –highlight-all-users –output-ppm-stream – | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i – -vcodec libx264 gource.mp4”. Ok I tell the meaning of huge line.
    • -800×600 This is a resolution.
    • repo.git/ This is a directory of SVN (convert into git) copy.
    • –max-files 99999 This is a limit of files to show simultaneously in the animation.
    • –disable-progress This is a flag to disable the load bar in the begining.
    • –stop-at-end This is a flag to close the aplication when it will be in the end.
    • -s 0.25 This is a number of seconds animation per real day in the life SVN.
    • –user-scale 2 This is a scale of icons or avatar of developers in the animation.
    • –highlight-all-users This is a flag to show all time the name of developer.
    • –output-ppm-stream – This is a flag to send the output to avi converter.
    • ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i – -vcodec libx264 gource.mp4 I don’t know the mean to ffmpeg params because you can read the ffmpeg manual.

And now you wait half hour to generate the animation.

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