Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python

Summary

The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online. It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams". I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this blog, where you can learn how to write Python code that records and plays multimedia content. Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams These days a smartphone is a portable film studio that fits in your pocket. The ability to not just readily view but also produce video has led to an explosion of video content easily accessible over the internet. There’s plenty of video and audio editing software available for users of all levels of sophistication. But if you have, say, a thousand video files that you need to automate reducing their volume by 50% and then extract thumbnail images, you don’t want to have to edit each of those files individually yourself. Similarly, you may want to record video, audio, or photos from a laptop’s webcam for some automated process too specialized for off-the-shelf software. Or maybe you’d just like your program to play a funny sound effect. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to control your computer’s microphone, webcam, and speaker hardware from Python and play multimedia files. This chapter assumes you have already read Chapter 21 to learn the basics about how programs work with image data. Since video is just a series of images, many of the same concepts apply. Audio and Video Data First, you should have a reliable way to open and view video and audio files. Since its release over twenty years ago, the open source VLC Media Player application has been free of charge and the gold standard for multimedia players. Install the VLC Media Player from https://www.videolan.org/vlc/, which runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Mobile versions for Android and iOS are also freely available. VLC is far superior to any multimedia application...