Question

I want to write a program to get the list of films in a computer. I thought there are 2 steps to this:

1. Get the list of all the video files in the computer.
2. Find out which of these are films.

For the time being, I am interested in how to get the first step done. Where can I find a list of popular video file extensions? How can I search the entire computer (in python) for those files?

Answer 1

You will get the list of video file extensions from many places by doing a simple google search. Maintain a list of extensions and walk the directory path and see if the file ends with any of the them.

list_of_extensions = ['flv','mp4','avi'] # Supplement it with what you find.
list_of_files = []


import os

def callback(arg, directory, files):
    for file in files:
        extn = file.split('.')[-1]
        if extn in arg:
               list_of_files.append(os.path.join(directory,file))

os.path.walk(".", callback, list_of_extensions)