Using the official r/place data

To use this library, first download the 79 gzip files described in the official post.

Next, run python place_vid/place_db.py /path/to/data/dir to build the database. This takes about 20 minutes, and the resulting SQLite database is about 12GB.

Making videos

Likely the most common use-case for the data will be to make time-lapse videos of r/place. To create a video, try something like this:

from datetime import datetime
from place_vid import PlaceVideo, PlaceDB

db = PlaceDB('/path/to/place2022.db')

ts = datetime(2022, 4, 1, 10, 0)
place_video = PlaceVideo(db, 35, 148, 11, 9, ts=ts, speed='normal', scale=16, duration=26)
place_video.write_gif('cc.gif', fps=15)

Here the calling structure of the PlaceVideo constructor is

PlaceVideo(db, x, y, w, h, ts=None, speed='normal', scale=1, duration=None)

where

• db is the filename of the database file created by place_vid/place_db.py
• x, y, w, h define the rectangle to capture
• ts is the starting time, which can be a datetime object
• speed is the rate at which the timelapse should play, and can be a real number. normal is 1200
• scale optional upscaling of the video
• duration length of time to capture

After instantiating the PlaceVideo object, you can save the video using the MoviePy interface, by calling .write_videofile('movie.mp4', fps=24) or even create an animated GIF as in the above example.