ferencek/videotools

Various tools for working with video files

Python video tools

A set of Python scripts for transcoding video files.

Table of contents

• Software setup
• Transcode video files
• Optional file operations
  • Swap video files
  • Rotate video files

Software setup

Prerequisites: ffmpeg, mediainfo, python3-pymediainfo

To use the video tools, clone the repository

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ferencek/VideoTools.git

cd VideoTools

Transcode video files

The main script in the repository is transcodeVideoFiles.py. For instructions on how to run it and to see available command-line options, run

python transcodeVideoFiles.py -h

To process all video files in a source directory and copy the output into a destination directory, run the script as follows

python transcodeVideoFiles.py -s /path/to/source/directory/ -d /path/to/destination/directory/

This might take some time depending on the number of video files contained in the source directory. The source and destination directory paths can be defined as either relative or absolute paths. The above command will first look for all video files in the source directory and based on their video and audio bitrates, it will select those that need to be transcoded. This step will produce in the current directory the following output files containing info about all, selected, and skipped video files

video_files_all.pkl
video_files_all.txt
video_files_selected.pkl
video_files_selected.txt
video_files_skipped.txt

Next, the transcoding step can be initiated by running the same command as before but adding the -t option. The --size option is also useful to add

python transcodeVideoFiles.py -s /path/to/source/directory/ -d /path/to/destination/directory/ -t --size

The above can also be done all in one go by adding the -t option the first time the command is run but doing it in two steps is useful in order to first collect some info on the number of files to be transcoded, etc. before starting the slow transcoding step.

This step will produce two additional text files in the current directory

video_files_failed.txt
video_files_processed.txt

whose content should be self-explanatory.

The transcoding step will reproduce the relative path structure from the source directory in the destination directory. In other words, if there exists a file inside a/b/c/ relative to the source directory, its transcoded version will also be placed inside a/b/c/ in the destination directory.

Optional file operations

Swap video files

Once the transcoding is done, one typically wants to replace the original with the smaller transcoded files. Since the number of files could be too large to mnake manual copying practical, the swapVideoFiles.py script is provided in the repository that can perform this operation automatically. The script is run as follows

python swapVideoFiles.py -s /path/to/source/directory/ -d /path/to/destination/directory/ -b /path/to/backup/directory/

Note that the script will look for the video_files_processed.txt file in the current directory and in case it does not find it, it will crash.

Rotate video files

The rotateVideoFiles.py script provided in the repository can be used to rotate those video files with wrong orientation. This is particularly useful for mp4 video files for which the rotation can be achieved without re-encoding the video file. This is acomplished by repacking the file and inserting an appropriate rotation field in the file metadata. Nevetheless, the script also supports file rotation through re-encoding but this is mostly relevant for non-mp4 input files. The script is run as follows

python rotateVideoFiles.py -l video_files_rotation.txt"

where video_files_rotation.txt is a text file containing a list video files to be rotated, rotation angles (in degrees) and conversion modes (repack or transcode) in the following format

/path/to/file1.mp4 :  90 : repack
/path/to/file2.mp4 : -90 : repack

The resulting rotated file will be stored in a newly created subfolder rotated/ in the same location as the original file.