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

11 comments

• fireattack 3 hours ago

  > playsound

  This library is unfortunately effectively abandoned -- it hasn’t received any updates in over four years, and its latest version doesn’t work at all: https://github.com/TaylorSMarks/playsound/issues/101

  (A workaround exists: downgrading to version 1.2.2, but that comes with its own issues.)

  The last time I experimented with audio in Python, I was surprised by how lacking its multimedia libraries are.

  For example, when I needed to read audio files as data, I tried `SoundFile`, `librosa` (a wrapper around `SoundFile` or `audioread`), and `pydub`, and none of them was particularly satisfying or has seen much active development lately.

  If you need to read various formats, pydub is probably your best bet (it does this by invoking ffmpeg under the hood). I was hoping for a more "native" solution, but oh well. Unfortunately, `pydub` is also unmaintained and has some serious performance issues (for example: https://github.com/jiaaro/pydub/issues/518 )

• amelius 2 hours ago

  > Playing a video file from your Python program is complicated.

  You can use PySide6. Here is an example:

      import sys
      from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QVBoxLayout
      from PySide6.QtMultimedia import QMediaPlayer, QAudioOutput
      from PySide6.QtMultimediaWidgets import QVideoWidget
      from PySide6.QtCore import QUrl
  
  
      class VideoPlayer(QWidget):
          def __init__(self):
              super().__init__()
              self.setWindowTitle("Video Player - video.mp4")
              self.resize(800, 600)
  
              # Layout
              layout = QVBoxLayout()
              self.setLayout(layout)
  
              # Video widget
              self.video_widget = QVideoWidget()
              layout.addWidget(self.video_widget)
  
              # Media player
              self.media_player = QMediaPlayer(self)
              self.audio_output = QAudioOutput(self)
              self.media_player.setAudioOutput(self.audio_output)
              self.media_player.setVideoOutput(self.video_widget)
  
              # Load video file
              self.media_player.setSource(QUrl.fromLocalFile("video.mp4"))
  
              self.media_player.play()
  
  
      if __name__ == "__main__":
          app = QApplication(sys.argv)
          player = VideoPlayer()
          player.show()
          sys.exit(app.exec())

• alabhyajindal 16 hours ago

  I learned Python from your Udemy course of the same name. Congrats on the new edition of the book!

• Simon_O_Rourke 6 hours ago

  Love it, that's where I direct all our new hires who want to pick up the basics of Python. I'll be reading this chapter myself this weekend too.

• cortical_iv 11 hours ago

  I'm curious why you didn't end up including this material?

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  • globalnode 8 hours ago

    When I saw yt-dlp I thought "risky", wasn't there was a lot of complaining from YT back in the day about this programs predecessor?

• analog31 11 hours ago

  This is fantastic. I've gotten so much out of cv2 and Python, and just a perusal of the page suggests that there's lots more to learn.

• bix6 14 hours ago

  One of my favorite programming books of all times. Cheers Al!

• xbmcuser 10 hours ago

  I was never able to get my head around programing despite my interest over the years. But LLM and python scripts in the last 3-4 years have changed my life.

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  • ymck 8 hours ago

    What thing have you found most interesting or impactful for you?

• geophph 12 hours ago

  And a transit nerd supporter!