Writing an mp4 video using python opencv

Question

I want to capture video from a webcam and save it to an mp4 file using opencv. I found example code on stackoverflow (below) that works great. The only hitch is that I'm trying to save it as mp4, not avi. Part of what I don't get is that the 'XVID' argument passed to the FOURCC writer is supposed to be, I think, an mp4 codec (from this link). If I change the filename to 'output.mp4' it tells me that the tag is invalid, so I have to believe that the XVID codec is actually making an avi file. Is this a stupid question? How do I write to an mp4?

I have found links showing how to convert an avi to an mp4 after the fact but that seems inefficient. Seems like I should be able to do it during the initial write.

import numpy as np
import cv2

cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)

# Define the codec and create VideoWriter object
fourcc = cv2.cv.CV_FOURCC(*'XVID')
out = cv2.VideoWriter('output.avi',fourcc, 20.0, (640,480))

while(cap.isOpened()):
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    if ret==True:
        frame = cv2.flip(frame,0)

        # write the flipped frame
        out.write(frame)

        cv2.imshow('frame',frame)
        if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == ord('q'):
            break
    else:
        break

# Release everything if job is finished
cap.release()
out.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Answer 1

fourcc = cv2.VideoWriter_fourcc(*'mp4v')

'mp4v' returns no errors unlike 'MP4V' which is defined inside fourcc

for the error "OpenCV: FFMPEG: tag 0x5634504d/'MP4V' is not supported with codec id 13 and format 'mp4 / MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14)' OpenCV: FFMPEG: fallback to use tag 0x00000020/' ???'"

Answer 2

This worked for me, I added images.sort() to keep the sequence order:

import cv2
import numpy as np
import os

image_folder = 'data-set-race-01'
video_file = 'race-01.mp4'
image_size = (160, 120)
fps = 24

images = [img for img in os.listdir(image_folder) if img.endswith(".jpg")]
images.sort()

out = cv2.VideoWriter(video_file, cv2.VideoWriter_fourcc(*'MP4V'), fps, image_size)

img_array = []
for filename in images:
    img = cv2.imread(os.path.join(image_folder, filename))
    img_array.append(img)
    out.write(img)

out.release()