webm.py

Yet another bikeshed to encode WebM videos from CLI.

Features

• Encodes input video to WebM container with VP9 and Opus
• Uses 2-pass encoding, has optional VP8/Vorbis and album art modes
• Fits output file to the size limit by default
• Allows to select video/audio streams and external audio track
• Can burn subtitles into the video
• Flexible set of options and ability to pass raw flags to FFmpeg
• Interactive mode to cut/crop input video with mpv

Requirements

• Python 2.7+ or 3.2+
• FFmpeg 2+ compiled with libvpx and libopus
• mpv 0.8+ compiled with Lua support, for interactive mode only

Installation

Just save https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kagami/webm.py/master/webm.py

Optionally put it somewhere in your PATH:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kagami/webm.py/master/webm.py -O ~/.local/bin/webm
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/webm
export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

Or with pip:

[sudo] pip install webm

Usage

NOTE: Windows users may want to add Python executable to the PATH. See https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#excursus-setting-environment-variables for details. Otherwise just type the full path to your python.exe location instead of python.

Use webm instead of python webm.py if you installed it with pip.

Show help:

python webm.py -h

Examples:

# Fit video to default limit
python webm.py -i in.mkv

# Fit video to 6 MiB
python webm.py -i in.mkv -l 6

# Set video bitrate to 600k
python webm.py -i in.mkv -vb 600

# Constrained quality
python webm.py -i in.mkv -crf 20

# Constant quality
python webm.py -i in.mkv -crf 20 -vb 0

# Encode with VP8 & Vorbis
python webm.py -i in.mkv -vp8

# Make album art video
python webm.py -cover -i pic.png -aa song.flac

Interactive mode

Pass -p flag to interactively select cut frargment/crop area with mpv. Demo:

Show help on interactive mode:

python webm.py -hi

Breaking changes policy

Versions from 0.y.0 (inclusively) till 0.y+1.0 (exclusively) keep backward compatibility of options and settings.

Versions from x.0.0 (inclusively) till x+1.0.0 (exclusively) keep backward compatibility of options and settings where x > 0.

Raising the minimal required version of dependency is not considered as breaking change. Adding new required dependency is breaking change.

Related links

webm.py wiki contains some encoding tricks and links to documentation on WebM/VPx.

License

webm.py - encode WebM videos

Written in 2015 by Kagami Hiiragi kagami@genshiken.org

To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.

You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.