Program Features

PhysMo 2 has most (if not all) of the features many expensive packages have without the price tag.

• Easy to use
• Calibrate program to real-world distances
• Can manually adjust timebase for high-speed cameras (more than 30 frames per second)
• Up to 10x magnification of videos for pin-point precision during analysis
• Edge-detection filter to assist with low quality video files
• Measure angles, multiple objects, and set axis of objects
• Frame-by-frame analysis with multiple shortcut keys for ergonomics
• Save images of analysed frames for later reporting on
• Reads most video files and runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux

Plus many more.

A little history on PhysMo...

PhysMo is a free video motion analysis program that was designed as a learning tool for teachers and students of high school physics. It was created in 2006 after an older program called PHYSVIS (the inspiration for PhysMo) began having difficulty opening newer video codecs. The goal of PhysMo was and still is much the same as PHYSVIS, being to provide an easy to use program to analyse motion in videos.

Setting up videos for analysis with PHYSVIS (pre 2000)

The first version of PhysMo was released in 2006 and used Quicktime for Java to open video files. This meant that the program would only run on Windows and OSX despite being a Java application. In addition to this, the commercial license of Quicktime meant that installation was difficult because it couldn't be bundled with PhysMo for distribution. The second version uses another project called ffmpeg to view video files, and because this is a totally free program, it has now been bundled with PhysMo 2 for installation.

PhysMo Screenshots

Screenshot of the old version of PhysMo under Windows XP

PhysMo 2 analysing parabolic motion under Linux

PhysMo 2 analysing air-track collisions under Windows. View the data.

PhysMo 2 analysing air-track collisions under Mac OS