ytffmpeg 1.4.0
Scripts and tools to ease the processing of videos for Social Media platforms.
Requires Python: >=3.11

# ffmpeg-youtube

Python project I use to convert my videos into stuff that can be posted on YouTube, TikTok,
Instagram and other social media sites.

FFMPEG is a great video editor by itself, but it's difficult to manage that incredible description
library it has.

With this project, I hope to make it easier for program-oriented folks like me to have a
descriptive file that converts your videos for you instead of having to remember complex filter
graphs. Simply describe what you want the video to do and this app will help you in executing those
changes.

This is a very context-specific application that is catered to my needs. I never expected it to
become popular, but if it does, here's to all who may contribute to this project or find it useful
in their own video editing process endeavours.

## Usage

When recording from phone or cam, it's difficult to manage all the media and content that comes in
without paying for crazy software to get it done. With this open-source product, you can simply
`pip3 install ffmpeg2youtube` and go!

This project honours configuration defined in a system-wide configuration file in `/etc/ytffmpeg/config.yml`,
user-specific configuration defined in `~/.config/ytffmpeg/config.yml`, with the configurations merged
together in that order as defined. A top-level directive `.ytffmpeg` in `jq` notation would configure
how `ytffmpeg` operates globally, but also respects that data structure on a per-project level as well.

To create a new project, let's use this:

```bash
ytffmpeg new
```

This will render a new project with the following directory structure:

```none
.
├── build/
├── readme.md
├── resources/
└── ytffmpeg.yml
```

You can drop your MP4 files from your devices into the `./resources/` directory.

Next, we can run

```bash
ytffmpeg refresh
```

to refresh the YAML file that is the configuration driving the
changes we will be performing here.

This may take a moment as ffmpeg converts your MP4 format videos into MKV format under high
compression as lossless as possible. This will reduce the amount of disk that is consumed by the
videos recorded and saved raw from devices. Subtitles will also be automatically generated from
the video files! You can suppress auto-subtitle generation with the `--no-subtitles` argument.

Once your videos have been compressed and subtitles generated for them, you will have artifacts
available in the `./build/` directory as well.

INFO: See doc/configuration.md for more information about `ytffmpeg.yml` configuration.

You can use this:

```bash
ytffmpeg gensubs [path-to-file.mkv]
```

This will generate subtitles in `build/path-to-file.${LANG}.srt` for any video file you give this command.
This is not necessary if you used `ytffmpeg refresh` to generate subs from a video resource. I used this
to get access to the sub-generation functionality this app provided with this command and so I exposed
that function to this command here. You can elect to do more with it after that.

Once your videos have been compressed and your configuration updated, you will see the YAML
has been updated with the new video. If you have a preferred name for it, you should rename
the file prior to running `ytffmpeg refresh`.

Observe that subtitles will also be generated as a result of this update. To avoid this, you can
use `--no-subtitles` when executing `ytffmpeg refresh --no-auto-subtitles` and it will go a bit faster.

You can update the YAML configuration to have it execute a number of filters and stream the videos
together into a final cut that can be used for social media sites and such.

The top-level `videos` is an array which will contain the set of video descriptions you will use
to describe how you want transformations done on those videos.

To learn more about the ytffmpeg.yml file, see docs/ytffmpeg.md

Once you have your transformations written out, you can use this:

```bash
ytffmpeg build build/myvideo.mp4
```

This will build your video. If you omit any arguments, it'll attempt to build all videos in your
project and ensure they are ready to go!

This project takes some of the rough edges off of the `filter_complex` argument in ffmpeg.

This started off as a simple script to try and automate some of the rough edges of my process
when recording content and publishing to the platforms.

## @FutureFeature

Features I'd like to add to this include:

- `ytffmpeg publish` to publish to your configured social media platforms
-- I want to support YouTube, TikTok, and Mastadon.
-- Right now, only an SFTP endpoint is supported (uses [Fabric](https://www.fabfile.org/)).
- Stream specifier error clarification: It would be nice to know that a stream is disconnected
  right there in vscode or some editor of sorts. I hope a project like this can make that more
  easily accesible as a potential by simulating the results of the configuration in ffmpeg's
  `filter_complex` parameter.