Xaraya commit history on video

2010-04-11 · 2 min read · coding integration revision control xaraya ·

Played a little with the gource log visualizer today. It is typically used to visualize committed revisions in a revision control system, although any system that logs events of some kind could be made to work with it I suppose.

I happen to have a repository of xaraya going back to 2002 in git, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

…more time passes than originally planned…

Result

8 years of commit history in 10 minutes of video. Produced with gource from a git repository of Xaraya. The video traces the 2.x main branch back to its origin, repository wise. The start is the import of the CVS postnuke repository into Bitkeeper. Since then xaraya has switched to monotone.

 1    gource --stop-position 1.0 \
 2           --camera-mode overview \
 3           --bloom-intensity 0.18 \
 4           --user-image-dir .git/avatar \
 5           --highlight-all-users \
 6           --output-framerate 60 \
 7           -s 0.5 \
 8           -720x576 \
 9    	   -a 0.3 \
10           --hide filenames \
11           --user-scale 1.4 \
12           --date-format %Y-%m-%d \
13           --disable-progress \
14           --output-ppm-stream - \
15    | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 -vpre default gource.mp4

This produced a video of 11 min. 35 seconds. To bring it back to 10 minutes the framerate was increased until the total time fell just below 10 minutes.

I specifically wanted the whole history to be in one video of 10 minutes (the Youtube maximum) which means compromising a bit on the quality. If there are things I can do within these assumptions to improve the video, I'd like to hear them.