Getting Eulerian Video Magnification set up on Ubuntu 14.10

  1. Download this version (R2012b a.k.a. v80) of the Matlab Compiler Runtime.

  2. Follow the instructions carefully and make sure to modify the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and XAPPLRESDIR environment variables appropriately. These changes can be made permanent in your shell startup profiles.

  3. Trusty Tahr (14.04) doesn’t usually come with the right codecs in order for the Matlab Compiler Runtime to do its thing. These packages seemed to do the trick for me: ubuntu-restricted-extras, and then add the ppa ppa:mc3man/trusty-media which provides gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

  4. Download and run the example code (binaries, not the Matlab source) from the project website here. The README is instructive. You will need to change the permissions of the main bin/evm executable for the bundled scripts to work properly. I also found that I was getting memory leaks for some reason so I recommend studying the invocations of the processing script that are documented in the bundled shell script that is designed to reproduce the results described in the authors’ SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation.

  5. [Optional] I found that the .AVI files that the code generates are broken in that neither Parole media player or VLC could make sense of them. mplayer seemed to ignore whatever was wrong with the output files.