Video Everyday

This project helps create a "1 second everyday"-style video using your existing media.

Thanks to Fig Vids for the footage! Go check out their YouTube Channel

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What is this?

If you've recorded lots of videos (e.g. with your phone), you use this code to turn all of that into a compilation video, for example showing 1 second of your life every day.

To get started

1. Configure the relevant values in default.json
2. Run make install && make migrate
3. Run the following:

make build
node src/server/server.js

# or to develop:
# make start

4. Then open up http://localhost:3000

The web interface allows you to (optionally) select which media to use in your final compilation videos. If you don't select anything, you can rely on the defaults.

5. When you're happy with your selection, click consolidate media in the web app.

6. You will then end up with a folder consisting of ~1 second videos:

0001.mp4 0002.mp4 0003.MOV

...and so on. You can then drag these into your video tool of choice, and join them all toegther. As an example, if using Screenflow:

1. Drag all files (0001.mp4, 0002.mp4 etc.) into screenflow
2. Select all clips
3. Arrange > Scale > Scale to Fit
4. File > Export

todo

• Make this entirely client side with the Web Codecs API?
  • Make a prototype first
• Support deselecting a media item
• 'Resolution' e.g. output videos every day, every other day, every week, month, year
  • Algorithm something like:
    • For each video in a playlist, also considering user-defined choices, iterate through a date object until a video is found (until we've hit the next milestone)
      • Resolution Every month = check 1st Jan 2020 - no video? Move onto 2nd Jan 2020 until a video is found, then increment the appropriate type and appropriate amount e.g. increment month by 1
• Playlist functionality (so you can make multiple videos)
  • needs a playlists table
    • Feature enhancement: copy this playlist to a new one
• Audit log for a single day, so you can see when the media item selection was changed
• Doocument the process of stitching together consolidated media + burning in subtitles (and resize to fit)
• If MP4Box fails, use ffmpeg instead for shorter segments. Edit: Should I Use FFMPEG regardless? MP4Box is not very accurate. Need to benchmark the overall times
• Add support for a Job Queue, stored in the DB, which can sequentially process videos even after the web server has started up
  • Provide a /jobs page which shows pending/in-progress/completed jobs
• allow selecting multiple videos/images for a given day (shift + click?) and have them either condensed into a 1-2 second timeframe, or just allow each of them to occupy the usual time amount
• try video-segment-duration-seconds of 1sec and make sure things work
• ensure working state is clean, and everything is committed, handle config files
• main-config.js has some hardcoded server paths, share this in a more intuitive way across the codebase
• Remove absolute paths from config files
• Use node.js recursive delete instead of rimraf (https://nodejs.org/api/fs.html#fs_fs_rmdirsync_path_options)
• Add timelapse support/speed up videos
• Overlay text on significant videos
• Document webapp and include a getting started guide
• Support images
• Refactor code + modularise
• add a test folder with test media and use md5 0003.MOV md5 0004.mp4 and so on to verify the output media, to to a demo vid/gif from the readme

todo: media generation task

1. Get an array of all top-level folders in the video-segment-folder, named allTopLevelSegmentFolders
2. For each media source item on the filesystem
3. Check the DB record. If defaultVideoSegmentDuration differs from config value, then delete the defaultVideoSegment file (not folder as other segments may have been generated), e.g. so delete VID-20190902-WA0004.mp4/VID-20190902-WA0004_15_18.mp4 on the filesystem
4. Maybe the config didn't even change, it which case check the file
5. Create/generate the video segment using the usual technique
6. Remove the current media source item from allTopLevelSegmentFolders
7. At the end of looping through all top level media source items, as a cleanup task, delete any remaining items in allTopLevelSegmentFolders

Useful ffmpeg commands

https://gist.github.com/protrolium/e0dbd4bb0f1a396fcb55

scripts WIP

these 1-2 second MP4 might be slow to watch, so how about displaying a sped up version either by:

changing the vid.playbackRate in JS, or, using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i $1 -r 10 -vcodec png out-static-%05d.png

command to overlay text on a video

ffmpeg -i 0009.mp4 -vf drawtext="fontfile=~/Library/Fonts/FiraCode-Bold.ttf: text='some text!':fontsize=80:fontcolor=white:x=100:y=100" 0009-text.mp4

Scaling videos - run this on all videos, then do a ffmpeg concat https://superuser.com/a/547406

ffmpeg  -i 0091.mp4 -filter:v "scale=iw*min(1920/iw\,1080/ih):ih*min(1920/iw\,1080/ih), pad=1920:1080:(1920-iw*min(1920/iw\,1080/ih))/2:(1080-ih*min(1920/iw\,1080/ih))/2" -c:a copy scaled/0091.mkv

Concatenating

This command will concatenate videos of the same format/size - confirmed working july 2020, must however use MKV files not mp4s for the final output. Input can be .mov or .mp4

ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -segment_time_metadata 1 -i files.txt -vf select=concatdec_select -af aselect=concatdec_select,aresample=async=1 final.mkv

files.txt

file 'scaled/0001.mkv'
file 'scaled/0002.mkv'
file 'scaled/0003.mkv'

subtitles

ffmpeg -i scaled/out.mkv  -filter:v subtitles=subtitles.srt scaled/out-subtitles.mkv