Description

Generating movie barcodes with OpenCV and Python

In order to construct movie barcodes we need to accomplish three tasks:

•  Determine the number of frames in a video file. Computing the total number of frames in a movie allows us to get a sense of how many frames we should be including in the movie barcode visualization. Too many frames and our barcode will be gigantic; too little frames and the movie barcode will be aesthetically unpleasing.
•  Generating the movie barcode data. Once we know the total number of video frames we want to include in the movie barcode, we can loop over every N-th frame and compute the RGB average, maintaining a list of averages as we go. This serves as our actual movie barcode data.
•  Displaying the movie barcode. Given the list of RGB averages for a set of frames, we can take this data and create the actual movie barcode visualization that is displayed to our screen.