I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a camera module.
I wanted a timelapse video.
This is how I did it:
Capture a sequence of image frames
This will capture a sequence of images (forever) approximately every minute, with the filename being a unix timestamp.
while true; do raspi-still -o $(date +%s).jpeg ; sleep 60s; done
Leave this to run for as long as you want to collect frames, and you'll end up with a bunch of numerically named files, like this:
$ ls 1504014800.jpeg 1504014866.jpeg 1504014931.jpeg ...
Combine the sequence of image frames into a jpeg
After you've got all the frames you want, use ffmpeg
to join the frames together. I do this on a different Linux box (my laptop) but you should be able to do it on the Pi too.
First make a command file listing all the jpeg files:
ls *jpeg | while read a ; do echo file $a; done > e.cmd
Next, feed that command file into ffmpeg to generate a video:
ffmpeg -f concat -i e.cmd -b:v 1500000 -r 24 -c:v libx264 e8.mp4
As a result, the output video should be in e8.mpg
which is
in a form suitable for playing with vlc or uploading to YouTube.