During one of my side projects, I needed to convert a batch of MOD videos into MP4s. Additionally, I required local timestamps to be printed on each of the entire videos indicating when each frame was taken.
There are some free, yet inconvenient cloud based options that would have required me to upload my videos to perform the conversion process, which would have taken quite some time (i.e. I am not going to upload tens if not hundreds of gigabytes of data to some server to then have to download even more data later).
Alternatively there are downloadable programs that could perform this same conversion process, but they had constraints imposed on the conversions. For example, only three videos or only 5-minute videos, etc., can be converted before needing to pay. But why pay for something that you can make for free?
Either way, neither of these solutions would have been able to put the local timestamps on the video. I also required the timestamping function to be performed on MP4s. This solution allows for both processes to be performed in one go.
Other video formats can be inputted. I just happened to have MOD and MP4 files that required this processing.
Video-Timestamper allows MOD and MP4 files saved in a given input directory to be timestamped based on their date modified timestamp. The videos will always be outputted as MP4 files to the given output directory. The slowest ffmpeg setting is used to output the smallest MP4 files. It was very important for my purposes that the outputted videos took up the least amount of space for archival purposes. However, this setting can easily be modified to speed up the video processing, if desired.
You can either...
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Run the Python script:
python -m video_timestamper -input_path "path/2/input/dir" -output_path "path/2/output/dir" -
Run the executable:
.\video_timestamper.exe -input_path "path/2/input/dir" -output+path "path/2/output/dir"
Both "path/2/input/dir" and "path/2/output/dir can be an absolute path or a path relative to the Python script
or executable. Either way, they must point to a directory that contains the videos that should be timestamped (and
converted to MP4 if they are some other video format) and the directory that will contain the timestamped MP4 videos,
respectively. This output directory will be created if it does not already exist.
Building a Windows executable can be done by running the build.bat script or the "build executable" configuration. Executables for other platforms can be built using a very similar method that was used to build the Windows executable. However, this is not done here.
You will need:
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PyCharm IDE >= 2022.1 (recommended, but not necessary).
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Python >= 3.10.
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moviepy >= 1.0.3 to extract the audio of the video for later merging.
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opencv-python >= 4.5.5.64 to timestamp the videos.
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ffmpeg-python >= 0.2.0 to merge the timestamped video with its audio.
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tqdm >= 4.64.0 to display the loading bars.
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PyInstaller == 4.10 to build executable.
- UPX >= 3.96 if you would like to make smaller executables.