Gource: visualization of changes in your project

Today I discovered a nice tool Gource (http://code.google.com/p/gource/) that in a graphical way presents the changes done over time in your project. It currently supports the most popular source control systems (e.g. svn, git, mercurial).

What one needs to do in order to generate a nice looking vid (like the one attached below that represents my IpStats project)? Not much:

1. Download and install gource from the URL provided above (Windows and Linux versions available)
2. Checkout the project (e.g. svn co )
3. Invoke gource: krystianek@ubuntu:~/projects$ gource -800x480 IpStatistics/
4. Or generate mp4 vid using gource and ffmpeg:

krystianek@ubuntu:~/projects$ gource -800x480 IpStatistics/ -o - | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 IpStats_800x480.mp4
 

The quality is not perfect but shows the main idea - I guess it is due to the compression used on blogger because the original quality is much, much better ;)

One remark is that the ffmpeg shall support the x264 codec (which was not the case for the package from repository on my ubuntu box). All is needed to do it on ubuntu box can be found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095