video-bookmarks

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

A command-line wrapper for the the mpv video player to create bookmarks in videos and audio files from te command-line. This can be useful when clipping videos for memes.

This is lightweight and easy to edit. The timestamps obtained may be used with ffmpeg.

Mostly vibe-coded at present! I can code, quantity of vibe coding will likely decrease over time.

Motivation

I quite like the command-line, and use it when I am not doing someting big. I wanted to cut out clips from a video from the command-line in order to share memes, but most of the tools were fiddley. So I decided to write this.

Alternatives and prior work

mplayer and mpv support scripting and you may be able to define a bookmarks system for them. This seemed too fiddle for my liking.

Video editors like [[Shotcut]] may be useful for this sort of thing. If you are posting on youtube or TikTok the short creators allow some good editing.

You could use vlc to get these timestamps.

Installation

Ensure mpv is installed:

sudo apt install mpv

You can then install video-bookmarks using pipx:

pipx install video-bookmarks

Usage

You can run video-bookmarks test.mp4. This then gives you a list of keybindings to run.

It will generate a bookmarks file called test.bookmarks.

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.