Detecting AV1-encoded videos with Python

Summary

Detecting AV1-encoded videos with Python In my previous post, I wrote about how I’ve saved some AV1-encoded videos that I can’t play on my iPhone. Eventually, I’ll upgrade to a new iPhone which supports AV1, but in the meantime, I want to convert all of those videos to an older codec. The problem is finding all the affected videos – I don’t want to wait until I want to watch a video before discovering it won’t play.I already use pytest to run some checks on my media library: are all the files in the right place, is the metadata in the correct format, do I have any misspelt tags, and so on. I wanted to write a new test that would check for AV1-encoded videos, so I could find and convert them in bulk.In this post, I’ll show you two ways to check if a video is encoded using AV1, and a test I wrote to find any such videos inside a given folder.Table of contentsGetting the video codec with ffprobeIn my last post, I wrote an ffprobe command that prints some information about a video, including the codec. (ffprobe is a companion tool to the popular video converter FFmpeg.)$ ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \ -show_entries stream=codec_name,profile,level,bits_per_raw_sample \ -of default=noprint_wrappers=1 "input.mp4" codec_name=av1 profile=Main level=8 bits_per_raw_sample=N/A I can tweak this command to print just the codec name:$ ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \ -show_entries stream=codec_name \ -of csv=print_section=0 "input.mp4" av1 To run this command from Python, I call the check_output function from the subprocess module. This checks the command completes successfully, then returns the output as a string. I can check if the output is the string av1:import subprocess def is_av1_video(path: str) -> bool: """ Returns True if a video is encoded with AV1, False otherwise. """ output = subprocess.check_output([ "ffprobe", # # Set the logging level "-loglevel", "error", # # Select the first video stream "-select_streams", "v:0", # # Print the codec_name (e.g. av1)...