I've completed the updates to the Barncam - mostly to do with the movie. I fiddled with the parameters for mpeg_encode and managed to get 3x the framerate for a much smoother animation, whilst maintaining (roughly) a 10Mb filesize.
The filesize will get smaller as the days get shorter as the script only picks the segment of the day with daylight.
There are occasional artifacts and pixelations from the compression - but i reckon the compromise is worth sticking with for now.