1. Add the JMF .jar files to the runtime classpath of the MASON model.
2. Click on the motion film camera icon, and choose a 24-bit option for the type of movie output, 10 or 15 frames per second (your mileage may vary).
3. Run the simulation from the desired beginning to ending tick.
4. Click the motion camera icon (which now has a red dot) to stop recording, and wait for the (often very large file) to complete writing.
5. In a DOS cmd window, execute the following ffmpeg.exe based command:
ffmpeg.exe -i moviefile.mov -vcodec libx264 moviefile.libx264.mp4
This will transcode the MASON/JMF-generated file moviefile.mov and write a new file called moviefile.libx264.mp4 that should be much smaller using the h.264 codec. Other codecs will yield approximately the same size files, but the quality will not be as good.
There are framerate, bitrate, and other options you can explore for finer control. For example '-b:v 512k' (without the quotes) will roughly double the bitrate and size of the file. Improvement in video quality might occur. Or not.
'-preset veryslow' will trade processing time for efficiency. Another good place to peruse.
This resulting file is playable by both Windows Media Player and QuickTime Player.
On Aug 28, 2011, at 1:47 PM, Tony Bigbee wrote:I've considered replacing JMF, but must admit it's a low priority. All of the JMF facilities are entirely encapuslated in MovieEncoder and MovieMaker so it should be pretty easy to swap another one in if you wanted to look into it.
As a side note, I'm wondering if you've looked at alternatives to the perpetually dying JMF. In the alternatives section in the below article on JMF, there is a list of alternatives including a library that mirrors the JMF API, but I don't have any experience with these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Media_Framework#Alternatives