node-drone-video

Save down AR.Drone video streams to your filesystem with associated navdata video streams. Splicing and editing the raw stream and navdata stream is left up to you to do in Final Cut or whatever your preferred video editor is.

Installation

First you must install ffmpeg and ffplay with at least the --enable-libx264 flag enabled. You can use Homebrew on OS X:

$ brew install ffmpeg --with-ffplay

You can install the drone-video program with npm:

$ npm install -g drone-video

Usage

Once installation is complete, you can begin recording video output from the AR.Drone. First connect to your drone's WiFi hotspot (for example: ardrone2_058438).

Once you are connected to the drone, you can begin the drone-video program. By default it connects to 192.168.1.1 (the default IP address of the drone), but you may override that via the --ip flag.

The drone-video program creates a directory with a timestamp to place the video and metadata files into:

• navdata.log - \n delimited log file of JSON objects with the contents of the AR.Drone's "navadata" events
• navdata.mov - A .mov video file with the navdata events rendered to a transparent video
• video.h264 - The raw h264 video stream with the PaVE frame wrapper removed
• video.m4v - A compressed version of the raw h264 feed compatible with most video players
• video.PaVE - The raw PaVe framed video feed dumped directly from the AR.Drone's video port

Video Splicing

So the drone-video program outputs a directory with distinct video.m4v and navdata.mov files. You most likely want to splice the two together so that you can upload the resulting video to YouTube or whatever. You can do this in your preferred video editing program.

A good ffmpeg command to splice the two videos together is:

$ ffmpeg -i video.m4v -vf "movie=navdata.mov[clip2]; [in][clip2] overlay=0:0 [out]" -sameq overlay.m4v

An example of the produced overlay video can be seen here: