One Pixel Cinema
blog.mattbierner.com
blog.mattbierner.com
Not sure if this is any better than your solution, but my approach with ffmpeg was this command:
ffmpeg -i "$myvideo" -r 1 -threads 4 -s 320x240 -vcodec mjpeg img%04d.jpg
The -r flag sets the framerate to 1, which in my understanding gets a frame per second. I also used all the cores of my laptop. The -s flag just does the same thing as your filter, though in my case I also fudged the aspect ratio of the resulting frames. I chose to save in jpeg to save some minuscule space.In my approach I squashed each frame horizontally to one pixel, so I get vertical slivers that average each frame. Then I just added them all together horizontally. Here is the result of that for Requiem for a Dream before resizing [0] and after [1] to get a better overview. In terms of usefulness it might not give too much information, but it's nice to look at and sometimes you can even spot individual scenes.
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/SgpYOoD.jpg [1]: http://i.imgur.com/pDGvlgb.jpg
https://github.com/mattbierner/blotre
Still not quite sure, but this feels like progress. It uses color to display status updates and has an API so your IoT devices can update their color.
It's used by at least one artist to do basically this, with Titanic: http://salavon.com/work/TopGrossingFilmAllTime/
"Kind of memorizing actually" -> "Kind of mesmerizing actually" ?