mkpodteaser: Create visual teasers for your podcast

Promoting your podcast in social media either requires on either an expensive and laborsome audio/audio tools or makes you dependent on propritary, paid-for online services.

mkpodteaser in contrast offers a relatively simplistic way to create your own powerful episode teasers. You provide a few static assets and an audio file, and mkpodteaser will add a waveform and render the result into an mp4 file that you can upload to your favorite social media site.

Preparation

Dependencies

mkpodteaser is designed to require as few dependencies as possible. It is provided as a bash shell script. As such, it will run on Linux, MacOS and BSD derivates, provided that bash is installed. Windows 10 users might be able to run it using the Linux Subsystem for Windows.

You need to have ffmpeg installed on your machine. Only versions > 4.0 have been successfully tested. Older versions are known to produce runtime errors.

One time setup for your podcast

1. Create a background PNG using your podcasts design
2. Adjust mkpodteaser.conf to make the design suit your needs

Per episode effort

1. Extract an interesting, brief (<1min) audio snippet from your episode
2. Create a quotes file (see below) that transcribes what is being said.
3. Run mkpodteaser like this:

  ./mkpodteaser examples/chaosradio/cr94\_t-hack.mp3 \
                examples/chaosradio/cr94_quotes.txt \
                "CR94: Computer-Telefonie" \
                cr94-teaser.mp4

Quotes file format

For the quotes, please create a text file with a content like this:

  0 7  Text transcription shown in seconds 0 to 7
  8 10 Text transcription shown in seconds 8 to 10

Bugs

Please report any issues to the issue tracker.