Author Topic: Animated gif from website  (Read 2630 times)

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Offline Audi

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Animated gif from website
« on: June 14, 2018, 09:16:50 AM »
Hi,

is it possible to have the weather radar, shown on websites below, isolated and use for own purposes, as an animated .gif?

with kind regards.

https://www.weerplaza.nl/regenradar/regen-en-wolken/

https://www.weerplaza.nl/regenradar/europa/benelux/regen-en-wolken/

Offline BrianLehan

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    • Grace C Lehan Memorial Weather Station
Re: Animated gif from website
« Reply #1 on: June 14, 2018, 11:10:09 AM »
The short answer is yes Audi. You can create an animated gif from any series of still photos, but it is a labor intensive project.

There are stand alone software you use on your own computer to create these animated gif files or on-line sites where you upload the stills and the website assembles them then delivers you a download of the finished gif. You would have to capture the images over a period of time, then crop them to the size you want, then assemble them into an animated gif file, then put that on the site you want.

So the key is it is a manual process you would have to do several times a day. Grab the images from that site, then create the gif file, then upload it to your site. Then a period of time later do it all over again to remain current. Now that being said there may be a scripting possibility of one of the many software packages that can at least create gifs where you could schedule a job and have the finished work dropped in a outgoing folder that gets transferred regularly to your web-server. But you still have to grab the current radar images.

The better option would be to use a live link to an animated graphic radar site and put that on your website. My Dutch is not so good these days so not sure but look at the page and see if there are any "share" and or "embedding" options or other usage links or agreements where you would embed the code to their animation on your own weather radar page and it would be current 24/7 no foot work by you creating animated gifs.

Or look for a software package available there that gives you access to government radar such as GRLevelX does here in the United States to the National Weather Service's "NextRad" weather radar system. Many of us take those images from our machines and show animations in real time on Saratoga-Weather based script template weather sites. I'm a recent convert to this type of radar and I'm sold. I spent years chasing old stale radar offered by weather underground and others. There must be someone in Europe offering similar software?

Brian
Davis Vantage Pro 2 plus
VWS 15x on Windows 7
Sarasota-Weather Template
Gr3 Radar

Offline SLOweather

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Re: Animated gif from website
« Reply #2 on: June 14, 2018, 01:22:52 PM »
Depending on your skill level, interest in learning, and cron and PHP access on your server, you can do it yourself in a script.

This loop of a StrikeStarUS radar image is done with a script I wrote.



And my sig image is a combination of scripts. One controls and grabs images from a PTZ camera, and stitches them. Another crops and creates the loop.

I don't usually distribute my scripts, because I'm a hack PHP programmer and don't have the patience to make the scripts more user friendly and fully document them.

BTW, taking apart other scripts and learning from them is how I got enough experience to create these. There are probably still echoes of Anole's weather sticker script buried in them. Over the years I learned to overlay text from Anole, and then figured out how to crop and overlay parts of images, select text colors based on the background, stitch panoramas, do the animations, and probably more. A lot of it, like the panorama stitching, was hand-tuned for a particular camera and its presets.

Offline tbrasel

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Re: Animated gif from website
« Reply #3 on: June 14, 2018, 03:46:32 PM »
I don't usually distribute my scripts, because I'm a hack PHP programmer and don't have the patience to make the scripts more user friendly and fully document them.

Dang, thought I was the Lone Ranger, but then I discovered Tonto  :shock:  :lol:
Best Regards
tbrasel

Bentonville Arkansas, USA
Hardware: Davis 6153 - Wireless Vantage Pro2 with FARS
Software: VWS V15.00
Website: https://www.nwarwx.com

Offline SLOweather

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Re: Animated gif from website
« Reply #4 on: June 14, 2018, 06:27:41 PM »
I don't usually distribute my scripts, because I'm a hack PHP programmer and don't have the patience to make the scripts more user friendly and fully document them.

Dang, thought I was the Lone Ranger, but then I discovered Tonto  :shock:  :lol:

Un gah wah, Kemosabe...

 

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