Quicktime/MP4 Fast Start
Forked from qtfaststart which has had no maintainer for many years.
Enable streaming and pseudo-streaming of Quicktime and MP4 files by moving metadata and offset information to the front of the file.
This program is based on qt-faststart.c from the ffmpeg project, which is released into the public domain, as well as ISO 14496-12:2005 (the official spec for MP4), which can be obtained from the ISO or found online.
The goals of this project are to run anywhere without compilation (in particular, many Windows and Mac OS X users have trouble getting qt-faststart.c compiled), to run about as fast as the C version, to be more user-friendly, and to use less actual lines of code doing so.
Features
- Works everywhere Python (2.6+) can be installed
- Handles both 32-bit (stco) and 64-bit (co64) atoms
- Handles any file where the mdat atom is before the moov atom
- Preserves the order of other atoms
- Can replace the original file (if given no output file)
Installing from PyPi
To install from PyPi, you may use pip:
pip install qtfaststart2
Installing from source
Download a copy of the source, cd into the top-level
qtfaststart2 directory, and run:
python setup.py install
If you are installing to your system Python (instead of a virtualenv), you
may need root access (via sudo or su).
Usage
See qtfaststart2 --help for more info! If outfile is not present then
the infile is overwritten::
$ qtfaststart2 infile [outfile]
To run without installing you can use::
$ bin/qtfaststart2 infile [outfile]
To see a list of top-level atoms and their order in the file::
$ bin/qtfaststart2 --list infile
If on Windows, the qtfaststart2 script will not execute, so use::
> python -m qtfaststart2 ...