you-can-datamosh-on-Linux (and Apple Macintosh, see the notes at the bottom)

Hello, friends! If you have Python 3 and ffmpeg installed you can datamosh! If you don't have ffmpeg there are instructions for getting it here: http://ffmpeg.org/download.html

What's a datamosh?

Here's an example made by someone on the internet!

https://vimeo.com/87545616

The mosh works out of the box and produces videos ready for social media sites like Twitter but I left extensive notes in the code to help you modify settings and understand what's happening.

How to run the datamosh program:

$ python3 do_the_mosh.py [video file name]

You can see command line options with:

$ python3 do_the_mosh.py --help

The datamoshed video will be in a new directory: moshed_videos/

You can most easily contact me on twitter. I am @happyhorseskull there as well.

Good luck, friends!

Editing python files is really easy with a simple code editor like https://atom.io/

If your editing session gets wild and you're not sure how to fix the code you can always re-download it from this github page so fear not!

Here are the really important variables in do_the_mosh.py for changing the video it creates:

start_sec: Time the video starts on original footage's timeline. Footage trimmed up to start_sec

end_sec: Time the video ends on original footage's timeline. Footage trimmed after end_sec

start_effect_sec: Time the effect starts on the trimmed footage's timeline.

end_effect_sec: Time the effect ends on the trimmed footage's timeline.

repeat_p_frames: If this is set to 0 the result will only contain i-frames. Possibly only a single i-frame.

GIF? GIF! with video_to_gif.py

Okay so MP4 files are fun and good but what about GIFs? That is easy with ffmpeg

$ ffmpeg -v error -i [video file name].mp4 [gif file name].gif

However the GIFs from that are kinda not that great so I adapted the information from http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html and made video_to_gif.py for your high-quality GIF convenience! The command to use it is:

$ python3 video_to_gif.py [video file name]

Your new GIF will be in the GIFs folder as [original video file name].gif The GIF will only be datamoshed if you convert a datamoshed video. video_to_gif.py will work with all sorts of regular, boring videos.

The current settings in video_to_gif.py will copy the first 10 seconds of the video to the GIF. But it it easy to change that. You can either:

• run the file from the command line and specify the start time and end time: $ python3 video_to_gif.py [video file name] 10 20 which will start at the 10th second and end on the 20th second.

or:

• you can edit video_to_gif.py and change the start_gif and end_gif variables to be whichever default values you prefer.

GIFs can become suprisingly large files. If you need to make a GIF file size smaller you can make it shorter or you can edit some variables in video_to_gif.py

fps is frames per second. A lower fps will create smaller files.

gif_width sets how wide the GIF is. The height will scale to match. A narrower width GIF will have a smaller file size.

Warning: video_to_gif.py will overwrite previous GIFs made from the same video file if you leave them in the GIFs directory.

pip3

Need videos to datamosh? Head over to Python's pip3 and install youtube-dl.

$ pip3 install youtube-dl # you may need to use sudo depending on your system.

Afterwards downloading youtube videos is as simple as:

$ youtube-dl --format 18 [youtube video url] -o youtube_video.mp4

But wait, there's more: youtube-dl works with lots of other sites like vimeo and can grab most twitter videos. To discover if a site is supported try:

$ youtube-dl --list-formats [website url]

which will show a list of available formats for the video on the page.

NOTE: If youtube-dl fails to download youtube videos try it on another site before deciding youtube-dl is broken. Sometimes youtube makes changes to its video player and it takes the youtube-dl team a few days to catch up.

The pip3 update command will get the most up-to-date version:

$ pip3 install update youtube-dl

Apple Macintosh notes

If your machine does not have Python 3 installed you can get it from Homebrew.

This page will help you with that http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/install3/osx/#install3-osx

Then you can run it with:

$ py3 do_the_mosh.py

(If that doesn't work you may need to find where Py3 was installed with $ which py3 or maybe $ which python3)

Also you'll probably want to get ffmpeg from Homebrew if you don't have it already. Helpful instructions are available here https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/MacOSX#ffmpegthroughHomebrew

Good luck!