Make your own Movie Barcodes

February 27, 2011 10:05 AM

Make your own Movie Barcodes
Inspired by this post, I've written a set of instructions for making your own movie barcodes.

Are there any movies Mefites would particularly like to see barcoded?

posted by alby (4 comments total)

I also played with making my own versions of the barcodes. Pretty similar idea, but one advantage of using mplayer is that you can render the image much faster than realtime.

mplayer -benchmark -nosound -vf "framestep=240,scale=:300" -vo png:z=9 "/home/samw/tmp/test.avi " ; mogrify '????????.png[1!x300!]' ; montage -geometry +0+0 -tile x1 ????????.png barcode.png ; rm ????????.png

In fact I'm pretty sure mplayer could be persuaded to do it all in one pass, using the framestep, scale, and tile video filters ... but in the few minutes I tried I couldn't get it to output 1 pixel wide frames as it claimed it was an illegal request.

Anyway, the command line above will render a 90 min film in about 70seconds on my machine. YMMV, but only do it in an empty directory as it deletes files with no concern for you greater well-being.
posted by samworm at 3:01 PM on February 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thank you! It took a bit of scripting to put the strips in the correct order, but I got it to work.

If anyone is interested, here is the barcode I made of Wim Wender's Der Himmel über Berlin (titled Wings of Desire in the U.S.).
Partway through the film is a switch from black and white to color which shows up quite prominently in the barcode.
posted by Wemmick at 9:25 PM on February 27, 2011

I would like to see Donnie Darko, but the original Donnie Darko, not that piece of crap one with the cool extra scenes that was dumbed down and made the movie suck.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:00 PM on February 28, 2011

Also, I own that Wim Wender's movie, but always fall asleep somewhere about the first 20 minutes. I never knew it turned to color. Seriously.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:01 PM on February 28, 2011