Support URL Streams via CLI/API

[Fookiwara]

Hello, its seems that cli cannot read video url:
"Path 'http://...' does not exist.
Any idea?
Regards

[adworacz]

Likely because that's an HTTP URL. I'd doubt that the author wants to add HTTP retrieval to this library.

If you want to scan that video, I'd suggest downloading it locally first, then run the CLI on it.

[Breakthrough]

It looks like OpenCV actually does support video stream URLs now, in addition to image sequences. The following issues are all related to this issue:

#152 #191

Once #152 is closed, it should allow you to use HTTP streams, however I can't give a definite timing for when this will work via the CLI. In the meantime, from Python, you can use the cv2.VideoCapture class instead of a scenedetect.VideoManager. Hope this helps, will keep this issue open until I figure out timing for the fix.

[Breakthrough]

Marking this as a known issue for now as it relates to image sequences. From the Python API, you can get around this by instantiating a cv2.VideoCapture object directly, as you would with an image sequence. I was unaware that the OpenCV API works with HTTP streams, so this should be pretty easy to implement a workaround for. It may be as simple as removing these two lines:

PySceneDetect/scenedetect/video_manager.py

Lines 231 to 232 in ccee583

	if not is_device and any([not os.path.exists(video_file) for video_file in video_files]):
	raise IOError("Video file(s) not found.")

However I need to double check how the command line interface is implemented to make sure it won't cause any downstream effects. Pinning this issue to raise awareness until a fix is available at least. Thank you for the report!

[Breakthrough]

This should be supported in the next release (v0.5.5). You can test it now by checking out the v0.5.5 branch. I just verified, the following now works:

scenedetect -i https://www.sample-videos.com/video123/mp4/720/big_buck_bunny_720p_1mb.mp4  detect-content

Note that URLs are not compatible with the split-video and save-images command.