Movie import

[Martin Eriksson]

Would be nice to download .avi-files from my Nikon D90

[tuneable (mjzeeman)]

I would like to add to this wish .MOV files (Panasonic) too.

Would be great if the option exists to download these as well.

[philh (philhowle)]

would love to be able to dowload movie files (.avi) from my canon a590 and also my future eos5d?

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

I welcome someone developing this feature. I don't anticipate having time to develop this in the next 12-18 months.

[tuneable (mjzeeman)]

I guess the ease of use of rapid photo downloader has made me somewhat lazy: on a few occasions I already forgot to copy the movies from my cards before erasing them.

In relation to the movie download topic:

As you say here and elsewhere (https://answers.launchpad.net/rapid/+question/88302) you would prefer to use meta data on these videos, right?

I just looked into other options for video meta-data extraction in python and found:
1. 'python-extractor'; uses libextractor, only very brief info.
2. 'pyffmpeg'; could be useful, but is still under development and ffmpeg does not return a lot of meta info (I guess using libavformat), as far as I am aware.

Another option could be 'exiftool', which according to the authors is 'a platform independent perl library and command line tool'. I installed it from the ubuntu repositories and it also seems to work for movies shot with several brands of compact camera. At least I could extract the creation dates easily.

For example, the following command showed me the creation date/time and mime types of all movie files I have stored in my photo library, made with different model Canon, Nikon and Panasonic compact digital cameras:

find ~/Photos/ -type f \( -iname '*.avi' -o -iname '*.mov' \) -print0 | xargs -0 exiftool -DateTimeOriginal -CreateDate -MIMEType

I can't test if this is of use for the D-SLR movies. And also, there are many more tags to use of course and exiftool can alos be used on folders directly.

Do you think exploring the uses of exiftool for RPD could be useful? Or are you strict on using python code?

[tuneable (mjzeeman)]

(continued from #4)

Well, it seems like the current development version of python library 'hachoir' (1.3.3) actually seems to retrieve the video metadata properly in most cases (e.g. using hachoir-metadata). For the .MOV files (Panasonic) I had to use the --force-parser=mov option.

[Randy Klein (randyklein99)]

Agree with everyone else requesting this feature.

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

I've started working on this feature. I'm using the library kaa metadata for python, which has been around for some time. The changes in the code are quite invasive, so I'm planning that the next beta release of the program will not contain any GUI elements to manipulate the file names. Instead, as a preliminary step, I'll assign a simple file renaming and subfolder generation rule. The feature to download videos will be turned on by a command line switch. Then in user testing I hope to hear if the video files can be downloaded without the program crashing, etc. When the code does what it should be doing, I'll make the changes in the GUI so that users can define their own renaming and subfolder generation rules.

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

I have committed some code that is ready for testing. It would be very very helpful if you can test it and report any problems with downloading videos (or photos). There were extensive changes to the code and it's quite possible that introduced some bugs. I have tested it but more testing always helps.

To get the latest code, ensure bazaar is installed on your system, then get the latest version by executing:

bzr branch lp:rapid

Check the changelog in the rapid directory to see what else has changed (there are quite a few changes).

Limitations:

Don't try to use the backup function. I need to add code to that.
The video or photo download folders might have horizontal scroll bars appear. I need to fix that.

[Randy Klein (randyklein99)]

So what is the command line switch to enable the video downloading?

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

The code was working well enough, so I decided to build the user interface on top. There is no command line switch.

[Randy Klein (randyklein99)]

Looks like it is working for me so far. Thank you very much for doing this. However, I don't get thumbnails of the video, just video icons. Here's an output from the terminal:

/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/kaa/metadata/disc/cdrom.py:37: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import md5
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/kaa/weakref.py:61: DeprecationWarning: object.__new__() takes no parameters
  return super(weakref, weakref).__new__(cls, object)
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished
Error: decodeVideoFrame() failed: frame not finished

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

Unfortunately ffmpegthumbnailer fails to generate thumbnails for some video files. I don't know why. Perhaps you check if it works with the latest upstream version, and if not, file a bug report.

[tuneable (mjzeeman)]

Wow, fix committed already? Thanks for adding the movie feature!

I have tested todays bazaar version and found it to work great for point-and-shoot movies (.MOV, .AVI) made by old and newer camera models (movies dated between 2004 and now; Canon, Nikon, Olympus). Works great and extracted all date/time-info as expected.

Comments (maybe more wishlist):
1. have you considered using the '-f' option for ffmegthumbnailer to get a filmstrip overlay? This will help determine which downloaded thumbnails related to videos and which ones not.
2. perhaps add a way to choose the download of only pictures or movies or both? Now it just does both.
3. I had no problems with ffmpegthumbnailer, but I did installed all available plugins for ffmpeg on the fresh Ubuntu 10.04 install I used for testing.

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

The film strip overlay by ffmegthumbnailer is really nice and I hope it will soon be a feature of Rapid Photo Downloader. However I need a way to add the overlay the film strip to thumbnails taken from the .THM files (this is a much more efficient way of generating the thumbnail, and the program uses it when it exists). Furthermore, it should be done without adding any more dependencies. Do you know of a way to easily do this in GTK?

It seems that many people want the option of being able to choose what they download. If it is not going to be possible to add a selection window prior to download, then I'll need to think of another solution to this request.

[Damon Lynch (dlynch3)]

Good news about the filmstrip for the thumbnails - I was able to figure out how to do it. You can test it if you like, with the updated code.

[tuneable (mjzeeman)]

The .THM files are just renamed jpeg files right? That should not pose to
much problems with dependencies if one wants to overlay another picture.

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Damon Lynch <email address hidden> wrote:

> Good news about the filmstrip for the thumbnails - I was able to figure
> out how to do it. You can test it if you like, with the updated code.
>
> --
> Movie import
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/368188
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> of the bug.
>
> Status in Rapid Photo Downloader: Fix Committed
>
> Bug description:
> Would be nice to download .avi-files from my Nikon D90
>
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