pytranscode 0.0.0

PyTranscode Readme

Copyright (C) 2009 Martin P. Buhr (http://lonelycode.com / twitter: @lonelycode)

PyTranscode is a set of scripts to make handling ffmpeg easier in python, it enables video information extraction, transcoding, presets, splash image extraction (multiple) and state reporting (percentage complete)

Contents:

1. What is this?

2. Hopeful Roadmap

3. How to use the scripts

4. License

1. What is this?

A while back I wrote a proof-of-concept webapp that basically replicated what Brightcove and other online video management tools did, and at its heart was a tool to control FFMPEG - one of the best command-line transcoders out there.

Now the webapp never took off (it was never launched, pending a rewrite), but I had started on rewriting the engine that would control the transcoder software.

I’ve since moved my limited attention span to other, shineir things, but thought I would release this piece of rather nifty and handy code to the public to help others who want to do something with video and don;t want to fork out a fortune.

2. Hopeful Roadmap

PyTranscode is hopefully going to be part of something bigger - the vision is to produce a set of django applications which can do the following:

• A storage engine for local or cloud-based storage

• A queue manager for scaling, this again would have vairous back-ends for local queue management or something like Amazon Queue Service

• A transcode server that can be run on multpile machines and be managed via an API OR be run in a mode to interact with the queue service

• An API wrapper to control the transcode-server for common tasks

3. How to use the scripts

There are five files with PyTranscode, these have the following basic functionsality:

• ffmpeg.py: Can be used to build a command line to run ffmpeg for various

  settings with input/output

• presets.py: Some presets to use with ffmpeg if you can;t be bothered to

  write out the long dictionaries some transcodes require

• runner.py: Runner basically allows you to run ffmpeg in a managed way and

  trap the output as well as the percentage complete

• splash.py: This will let you pull thumbnails at equal intervals from the

  inpout file and return the filenames

• video_info: Need to know everything about a video file? This basically parses

  the -i output from ffmpeg to get all the details and present them as a class

Depending on what you need, the documentation on how to use each one is in the header of the file.

If you want to see a test run, there’s the file test.py which should show an easy way to get started with these classes.

4. License

Copyright (C) 2009 Martin P. Buhr (http://lonelycode.com / twitter: @lonelycode)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

IF YOU USE THIS SOFTWARE DO US A FAVOR AND LET ME KNOW :-)