Matlab - 01

Working with Videos in MATLAB

MATLAB supports only "raw" (uncompressed) avi files on Linux and only some Indeo and Cinepack compressed versions on Windows. But mostly we get videos in MPEG. So we need to convert to raw or any supported format. For this, FFmpeg can be used.

AVI means Audio Video Interleave and is only a container format. AVI does not mean raw video. It is possible to have mpeg or many other compressed avi files. MATLAB cannot read such a compressed avi files. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave).

1. Section: If we have raw video (or supported format)

If we have raw video, then handling in MATLAB is quite easy. We need to use functions mmreader, read, movie, mmfileinfo, frame2im, im2frame, aviread, avifile, aviinfo, addframe (avifile), close (avifile), movie2avi functions. Following code reads and plays back a given video. For further details and other functions see MATLAB help.

%Reads and plays back the movie file xylophone.mpg.

xyloObj = mmreader('xylophone.mpg');

nFrames = xyloObj.NumberOfFrames;

vidHeight = xyloObj.Height;

vidWidth = xyloObj.Width;

% Preallocate movie structure.

mov(1:nFrames) = struct('cdata', zeros(vidHeight, vidWidth, 3, 'uint8'),
'colormap', []);

% Read one frame at a time.

for k = 1 : nFrames

mov(k).cdata = read(xyloObj, k);

end

% Size a figure based on the video's width and height.

hf = figure;

set(hf, 'position', [150 150 vidWidth vidHeight])

% Play back the movie once at the video's frame rate.

movie(hf, mov, 1, xyloObj.FrameRate);

2. Section: If we have not supported video format

We can use any converter tool to convert compressed video to uncompressed avi format. One such tool is FFmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/index.html). Mplayer, VLC and many other players are based on this codec.

If you are a Windows user, just download latest binary from http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/ffmpeg/ (Any virus? I don't know. Download at your risk!). (You can use WinRAR to uncompress .7z - http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Compression_and_Zip_File_Utilities/WinRAR_Download.html )

Use this command to convert any compressed file (compressed.any) to uncompressed avi file (uncompressed.avi) (Note: pthreadGC2.dll file should be in the same directory as ffmpeg.exe).

ffmpeg.exe -i compressed.any -vcodec rawvideo uncompressed.avi

This should work most of the cases. However, sometimes it may not work (because, avi is a container format by Microsoft! :)). The converted video may have only blank frames or MATLAB may not be able to read it properly. In such a case, you can try steps explained in Section 3.

3. Section: If Section 2 does not work

Create a folder by name "images". Use this command to convert each frame of the compressed video to bmp (or ppm, jpg) images using ffmpeg or virtualDub and put it into the folder "images".

ffmpeg.exe -i compressed.any images/image_%d.bmp

Now you can use these images for processing. If you want uncompressed avi file, then use following MATLAB code to combine all raw images into a single uncompressed avi file.

%Script file to combine images to an uncompressed avi file

%Directory that contains images

in_dir = 'D:\temp\ffmpeg.rev11870\images\';

fout = 'D:\out.avi'; %Output file name

num_images = 341; %Number of images

%Set a suitable frame rate fps

aviobj = avifile(fout, 'compression', 'none', 'fps', 25);

for i = 1:num_images;

temp = sprintf('%d', i);

name = [in_dir, 'image_', temp, '.bmp']; %For ppm, change

img = imread(name);

frm = im2frame(img);

aviobj = addframe(aviobj,frm);

i

end;

aviobj = close(aviobj);

4. Useful Functions

mmreader, read, movie, mmfileinfo, frame2im, im2frame, aviread, avifile, aviinfo, addframe (avifile), close (avifile), movie2avi

5. Supported File Formats

Platform		Supported File Formats
Windows		AVI (.avi), MPEG-1 (.mpg), Motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2), Windows Media Video (.wmv, .asf, .asx), and any format supported by Microsoft DirectShow.
Macintosh		AVI (.avi), MPEG-1 (.mpg), MPEG-4 (.mp4, .m4v), Motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2), Apple QuickTime Movie (.mov), and any format supported by QuickTime as listed on http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html.
Linux		Motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2), Any format supported by your installed plug-ins for GStreamer 0.10 or above, as listed on http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/plugins.html, including AVI (.avi) and Ogg Theora (.ogg).

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