Gource tool offers very nice and appealing visualization  of SW project history. Gource works with all major version control systems – git, svn, etc.  can be easily installed from Ubuntu repos and is fairly easy to use.

Here is visualization of my btclient project (videos works best in Firefox):

Generated with this command:

gource --file-idle-time 0 -s 1 --auto-skip-seconds 1 --stop-at-end --title BTClient --output-ppm-stream - -r 25 ~/workspace/btstream/.git/ | ffmpeg -y -r 25  -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i -  -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -vprofile baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p gource.mp4

 

And here visualization of more complex project – libtorrent:

Generated with this command:

gource -s 0.01 --file-idle-time 0  --hide filenames --date-format "%B %Y" --stop-at-end --title libtorrent --output-ppm-stream - -r 25 libtorrent-fixed/.svn/ | ffmpeg -y -r 25  -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i -  -vcodec libx264 -preset medium  -vprofile baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p  gource2.mp4