Question

I’m relatively new to python and obviously new to stackoverflow. My goal is to create a file containing information about video files in my library: codecs, size, bitrate, and resolution, that I can easily parse. I plan to use this information to determine which video files are low enough quality to warrant replacement with better-looking encodes.

I found MediaInfo on sourceforge. My script recursively traverses a given directory and calls MediaInfo via subprocess. I resolved an earlier bug thanks to this thread on stackoverflow describing how to work around Windows permission errors. I also implemented code from this thread to hide the windows command prompt console, which was instantiated with every call to subprocess.

Currently, my code fails with the following error:
returned non-zero exit status 1

The current state of my script is below. Thanks in advance!

import os, subprocess

I speculate that the issue may lie with how i’ve formatted the strings which are passed to subprocess

types = [".avi", ".mp4", ".mkv"]
app = "MediaInfo.exe"
app_path = os.path.join("C:\Program Files\MediaInfo\MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.61_Windows_x64", app)
movie_dir = "L:\Movies"
current_file = ""

The below code launches subprocess without console windows

startupinfo = subprocess.STARTUPINFO()
startupinfo.dwFlags |= subprocess.STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW

Recursively examine directories for media and analyze matching files

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(movie_dir):
    for filename in files:
        for extension in types:
            if (filename.endswith(extension)):
                current_file = '"' + os.path.join(root, filename) + '"'
                output = subprocess.check_output([app, current_file], 
                    executable=app_path, 
                    stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
                    startupinfo=startupinfo)
                print app_path, current_file, output #debug
                with open("out.txt", "a") as f:
                    f.write(output)

Answer 1

If you are on python 3 (and windows) and above, try using raw strings (or escaping backslashes on windows), OR use forward slashes in forming path! So instead of

app = "MediaInfo.exe"
app_path = os.path.join("C:\Program Files\MediaInfo\MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.61_Windows_x64", app)
movie_dir = "L:\Movies"

Try using

app = r'MediaInfo.exe'
app_path = os.path.join(r'C:\Program Files\MediaInfo\MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.61_Windows_x64',  app)
movie_dir = r'L:\Movies'

And similarly ahead also in your script. I have also faced a lot of trouble with spaces in the string ‘C:\Program Files..’ and by not escaping the backslashes.