movie_publisher

This package contains several tools for using movie files in ROS (playback, conversion to bag files etc.).

It handles any file formats the system installation of ffmpeg can decode.

Important: This package is meant to work with moviepy. However, due to packaging issues, moviepy cannot be installed automatically as a dependency. There’s a fallback using OpenCV, which is however worse. Please, install moviepy manually calling:

sudo pip install moviepy

or

rosdep install python-moviepy-pip

Main tools

• movie_publisher_node: A ROS node that serves a video file as video topic source (sensor_msgs/Image and friends).
• movie_publisher.launch: A launch file for convenient usage of the node. It also allows starting an image_transport/republish node that converts the video stream from raw to compressed/theora. In the immediate mode, it can also be used to convert video files to bagfiles in a batch.
• movie_to_bag: A batch script that takes a video as input and transforms it into a bag file.
• add_movie_to_bag: A batch script that adds a video as a topic into an existing bag file.

Helper tools

• fix_bag_timestamps: A batch script that rewrites bag files so that the message publication time is taken from the message header. This allows you to generate bagfile data at high speed and then reprocess them to have more suitable publication timestamps.
• merge.py: A copy of srv_tools/merge.py which is not available in indigo.

movie_publisher_node

The node can run with either of two backends - moviepy and opencv. moviepy is strongly recommended, as it uses ffmpeg, which is quite versatile and efficient. Is you do not set the backend param, autodetection is run.

Published topics

• movie (sensor_msgs/Image): The published movie, in raw format.

Node-private parameters:

• movie_file (string, required): Path to the movie to play. Any format that ffmpeg can decode.
• fps (float, optional): If set, the playback will be at the specified FPS (speeding up/slowing down the movie).
• start (float|tuple|string, optional): If set, playback will start from the specified time. Can be expressed in seconds (15.35), in (min, sec), in (hour, min, sec), or as a string: '01:03:05.35'. Cannot be set together with end and duration.
• end (float|tuple|string, optional): If set, playback will stop at the specified time (not affected by start). Can be expressed in seconds (15.35), in (min, sec), in (hour, min, sec), or as a string: '01:03:05.35'. Cannot be set together with start and duration.
• duration (float|tuple|string, optional): If set, playback will have this duration. If end is also set, the duration is counted from the end of the clip, otherwise, it is the duration from the start of the clip. Can be expressed in seconds (15.35), in (min, sec), in (hour, min, sec), or as a string: '01:03:05.35'. Cannot be set together with start and end.
• loop (bool, default False): Whether to loop the movie until the node is shut down. Exludes immediate.
• immediate (bool, default False): If True, the movie will be processed and published as quickly as possible not waiting for the real time. The timestamps in the resulting messages act “real-world-like” (i.e. 15 FPS means the frames’ timestamps will be 1/15 sec apart). You can set fake_time_start if you want these timestamps to begin from a non-zero time. Excludes loop.
• playback_rate (float, optional): If set to a number, immediate mode will not play as fast as possible, but at this rate (set the rate to a number where you do not lose any messages, e.g. in image_transport/republish).
• fake_time_start (float, default 0.0): Used with immediate to specify the timestamp of the first message.
• frame_id (string, default “”): The frame_id used in the messages’ headers.
• spin_after_end (bool, default False): If True, a rospy.spin() is called after the movie has been published.
• verbose (bool, default False): If True, logs info about every frame played.
• wait_after_publisher_created (float, default 1.0): A workaround for the case where you need to give your subscribers some time after the publisher was created. Tweak this number until you get no missing start messages.
• publisher_queue_size (int, default 1000 in immediate mode, 10 otherwise): queue_size of the movie publisher.
• backend (string, default “moviepy”): The backend to use for reading video. Either moviepy or opencv. If moviepy is selected and not found, opencv will be used (which might support less codecs).
• ffmpeg (string, default “”): If nonempty, specifies the (absolute) path to the ffmpeg binary to use.

movie_publisher.launch

This launch file takes arguments with the same name as the node’s parameters.

Additionally, it takes these arguments:

• transport (string, default 'raw'): Type of the image transport. The launch file will start up an image_transport/republish node that publishes the video encoded to this transport type.
• republished_topic_basename (string, default movie_$(arg transport)): Base name of the topic that will serve the republished messages. Full name of the topic will be $(arg republished_topic_basename)/$(arg transport) (or $(arg republished_topic_basename) in case of raw transport). The base name cannot be the same as the topic the movie_publisher_node subscribes to (movie by default).

movie_to_bag

Convert a movie file to a bag file with video topic.

It is a Bash script with ROS node-like API - you pass it parameters via _param:=value on commandline or via ROS param server.

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file