Question

Is it possible to write Python code that gets a video file (mpg, avi, wmv, mov, etc) and a time interval (e.g. from 5_min-10_secs-11_ms to 10-min_15-secs-40_ms) and create a small video from this interval?

I know this is possible with ffmpeg, mencoder and other programs, but I’d like to do this in Python code.

Answer 1

Googling for “python library to edit video file” lead me right back to SO:

• Best video manipulation library for Python?

• Looking for python video editing/processing capabilities that will work with Google App Engine

In addition to getting this kind of functionality from a library, I often use a system call (os.system or subprocess) to call mencoder or ffmpeg. You could write a function to do this, in pythonesque pseudo code:

def getVideoChunk(filepath, timerange, outputfile):
    retcode = systemcall("ffmpeg %s %s", filepath, timerange, outputfile)
    return retcode

Ofcourse you need to choose a way of running tge systemcall and you need to learn some ffmpeg syntax.

EDIT (based on comments) Assuming the syntax of mmpeg is like:

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -sameq -ss 00:02:00 -t 00:02:00 output.mpg

The call would look like:

getVideoChunk("input.mpg", "00:02:00", "output.mpg")

and the system call bit would look like (note I use os.system):

os.system("ffmpeg -i %s -sameq -ss %s -t %s %s" % (filepath, timerange, timerange, outputfile))

note that this code is also pseuodo python code and I have not tested it…the code is purely instructional.