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Tecplot’s avi use broken windows codecs

April 29th, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

For those of you that use tecplot, you know that while the interface is fairly straightforward and the resulting visuals look pretty good, tecplot has one major flaw. The animations are generated in with essentially the MSRLE codec from a decade ago. The codec’s color palette generally cannot handle continuous color flooding  in tecplot; if you try to open it up on other machines or convert them to say flash video or mp4, you will find that the the colors are all messed up. Sometimes the frame size in tecplot causes the video to not display correctly.

So to fix this issue, I found out that the swf output actually works correctly. Modifying the previous pbox2avi script, I created a tecplot specific script to generate mpeg’s or whatever else ffmpeg can spit out. The script is pretty much a more rudimentary version of pbox2avi.py.

Requirements: swftools, ffmpeg

Download tecplot2mpeg.py.

As usual the code for the script is below:

# Copyright 2010 Jonathan Wong
# python script to convert SWF files generated from tecplot to mpeg
 
#requires swfextract
 
import commands,sys,re,math
 
def parse(filename):
#check filename for .swf extension
if not filename.find('.swf'): # not a comprehensive check
return
 
fileprefix = filename[0:filename.find('.swf')]
commands.getstatusoutput("rm %s.mpeg" % (fileprefix,))
 
#open file
status, output = commands.getstatusoutput("swfextract %s" % (filename,))
 
print output
 
#find "JPEGs: ID(s)"
slide_identifier = "PNGs: ID(s)"
start=output.find(slide_identifier)
slide_extract=[]
if start:
start += len(slide_identifier)+1
slide_end = output.find("[-f]",start)
print start,slide_end
slide_extract=output[start:slide_end-2].replace(" ","")
 
# now extract all the data
print "swfextract %s -P -p %s" % (filename,slide_extract)
 
slides = slide_extract.split(",")
digits = 1 + int(math.log10(int(slides[-1])))
 
for slide in slides:
print "Processing frame: %d" % (int(int(slide)/2)+1,)
print ("swfextract %%s -p %%s & mv output.png %s%%0%dd.png" % (fileprefix,digits,)) % (filename,slide,int(int(slide)/2)+1)
status, output = commands.getstatusoutput(("swfextract %%s -p %%s && mv output.png %s%%0%dd.png" % (fileprefix,digits,)) % (filename,slide,int(int(slide)/2)+1))
 
status, output = commands.getstatusoutput("ffmpeg -f image2 -i %s%%04d.png -b 600k %s.mpeg && rm %s*.png" % (fileprefix,fileprefix,fileprefix))
return slide_extract
 
if __name__=="__main__":
slides=parse(sys.argv[1])
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