Timelapse 3 — MP4

Timelapse is the most downloaded ACAP I have published. Version 3 is the biggest change since it was written: recordings are now MP4/H.264, they play directly in the browser, and the whole interface has been rebuilt around a single recordings library.

This page is written for people already running Timelapse 2. If you are new to Timelapse, that page still explains the basic idea — capture stills on a schedule or a camera event, and turn months of them into a short video.

Requirements — read this before upgrading

Timelapse 3 does not run everywhere Timelapse 2 does.

  • aarch64 cameras only. Version 3.x is not built for armv7hf. If your camera is armv7hf, stay on Timelapse 2.x — it keeps working.
  • AXIS OS 12 or 13. The package declares compatibility with OS 12 as the floor and OS 13 as the ceiling.
  • The ACAP is signed, so it installs on AXIS OS 13 devices without turning off signature verification.
  • SD card storage must be enabled on the camera.
  • Administrator access to install and configure.

The package keeps the ID and binary name timelapse2 on purpose — that is what makes the in-place upgrade and recording migration possible. The side effect: Timelapse 2 and Timelapse 3 cannot be installed side by side on the same camera.

What actually changed

MP4 instead of AVI

The AVI output was the oldest design decision in the app and the most limiting one in practice. Timelapse 2 wrote MJPEG AVI — every frame stored as a complete JPEG, with nothing shared between frames. Version 3 encodes H.264 into MP4.

The file gets dramatically smaller. MJPEG compresses each frame on its own; H.264 also compresses across frames, and a timelapse from a fixed camera is about the best case there is for that — the sky and the light change, but most of the scene is identical from one frame to the next. The same image sequence that filled a multi-gigabyte AVI now produces a fraction of the data on the SD card.

The 2 GB ceiling is gone. The AVI container stores its size in a 32-bit field, which capped a recording at roughly 2 GB no matter how much space the SD card had. That is why Timelapse 2 had an archive size setting — it force-split recordings before they hit the wall. In version 3 that setting no longer exists: archives are split on time (daily, weekly, monthly, or never) because you want them split, not because the format demands it.

The rest follows from the format change:

  • Live recordings play in the browser, no download step.
  • Live recordings export as MP4.
  • Archived recordings play, download, or delete from the same list.
  • The files open in any normal player instead of needing a specific one.

One recordings page

The separate Profiles page is gone. Live recordings and archives now live in one table, and recording settings are added and edited from that same page. Each row carries its own actions, and the list shows Days — how much time the recording or archive actually covers — instead of the old First Capture column.

Settings that save like settings

Changing a name, trigger, expected images, or archive cadence saves immediately. No media-processing progress dialog for changes that do not touch media. The progress dialog now only appears when real media work is required — for example changing playback FPS on a recording that already has media, which means a re-encode.

The Save button only appears when something has actually changed.

Archive control

Archive cadence per recording: No Archive, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. No Archive is new — use it when a recording should just keep running without automatic splits.

Use automatic archiving. Pick Daily, Weekly, or Monthly rather than leaving a recording to grow forever. Each archive becomes a finished, playable MP4 you can hand to someone, and retention can clean up the old ones on its own.

Choose the cadence from how many images you capture per day. That is the only number that matters, because what you want out of each archive is a clip that is worth watching — a few thousand frames, not five and not fifty thousand. The recording dialog does the arithmetic for you: enter Expected images per day and it shows the expected images per archive as you change the cadence. For timer triggers the images-per-day value is filled in from your interval automatically; for event triggers, estimate how often the event actually fires.

Images per day Capture pattern Recommended cadence
Under ~50 One sun-noon shot a day, or a handful of motion events Monthly — ~30–1,500 images per archive
~50–500 A frame every few minutes, or a steadily triggering event Weekly — ~350–3,500 images per archive
Over ~500 A frame every minute or faster Daily — 500+ images per archive

Aim for somewhere around 1,000–3,000 images per archive. At 30fps that is roughly half a minute to a minute and a half of video per file — long enough to show the change, short enough to send to someone.

Two edges worth knowing. If you capture only one image per day, even a monthly archive holds ~30 frames, which is one second of video — use No Archive there and let the recording accumulate into something watchable. And at a frame per minute, Monthly would bundle ~45,000 images into a single file; that is where Daily earns its place.

Archive retention moved to the Settings page, where it applies as a cleanup policy so a long-running install does not quietly fill the SD card. Cadence and retention work together: cadence decides how big each archive is, retention decides how many you keep.

Clearer destructive actions

The two operations that used to be easy to confuse are now separate and named for what they do:

  • Reset media — clears captured media, keeps the recording’s settings and schedule.
  • Delete recording — removes the recording settings and its media.

Archive deletion removes only the selected archive file and its list entry.

Upgrading from Timelapse 2

Timelapse 2 recorded AVI. Timelapse 3 uses MP4. When the app starts and finds old AVI recordings, it shows an AVI migration required dialog before normal operation begins.

You get two choices:

  • Convert to MP4 — converts the old AVI recordings.
  • Cancel and keep AVI — stops migration and leaves the original files untouched, so you can manually reinstall 2.x if you want to.

During migration you see progress for the current file and for the run as a whole, and a cancel button. Cancelling removes the temporary MP4 output and leaves every original AVI intact.

After a successful migration:

  • Converted recordings are available as MP4.
  • Legacy AVI/IDX files and old Timelapse 2.x folders are cleaned up.
  • The migration prompt does not come back.

An ongoing 2.x recording is imported as the live recording base where possible, rather than being dropped in as a finished archive — so a construction-site recording that has been running for eight months continues in the MP4 workflow instead of being closed off. Completed AVI archives become MP4 archives.

If the camera holds a recording you care about:

  1. Back up the camera’s SD card storage (normally /var/spool/storage/SD_DISK/timelapse2).
  2. Install Timelapse 3.
  3. Open the app from the camera’s web interface.
  4. Run the AVI migration when prompted.
  5. Confirm live recordings and archives are listed.
  6. Play or download a few of them to verify the result.

Migration takes time proportional to how much old material is on the card. On a fleet, test one representative camera first.

Recording settings

Per recording you configure:

  • Name
  • Resolution
  • Playback FPS
  • Trigger — event based (a camera event fires a capture) or timer based (fixed interval)
  • Daylight condition — Any time, Sunrise to sunset, or Dawn to dusk
  • Text overlay handling
  • Archive cadence
  • Expected images per day

Note that capture interval and playback FPS are unrelated. The interval decides how often a frame is taken; FPS decides how fast those frames play back. 10fps is fine for review, 30–60fps looks smoother for a presentation video.

Location and sun events

Set the camera location and Timelapse 3 calculates dawn, sunrise, sun noon, sunset, and dusk. Those drive the daylight filters above, and Timelapse 3 can also fire a Sun Noon event — which is the cleanest way to get one consistent daily construction-progress image, since the light and shadows land in the same place every day.

Get it

Timelapse has been downloaded more than any other ACAP I have written, and almost all of version 3 comes from what people reported using version 2 for. Keep that coming.

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