Videogrep.sh

Search videos for matching words or phrases, and generate a cut-down version in the ~/videogrep_output/ directory, containing only the matching dialogue.

For example, keep only the bits of a video where people say "banana".

Requirements

Dependencies

• bash - it's a bash script
• egrep - for finding matches in the subtitles
• ffprobe for getting video information like dimensions, aspect ratio (in FFMPEG package)
• bc - for calculating accurate video frame rates
• mencoder - for creating the generated video
• mplayer - for playing the generated video

Video requirements

• Put the videos you want to search, and their subtitle files, in a directory together.
• The source videos must have accompanying subtitles files, in either .srt or .sub format!
• The subtitle file names must also match the videos to which they refer.
• Here's a valid example (videogrep will find the subtitles OK):

./some_vids/my-cool-video-1080p.mp4
./some_vids/my-cool-video-1080p.srt

NOTE: Many YouTube videos have subtitles. You can download YouTube videos and their subtitles using various websites.

Installation

Copy videogrep.sh to a folder in your $PATH.

Usage:

You must give:

• the input video (must have a matching subtitle file)
• the search term (can be an egrep regex like one|two|every.*|a whole phrase

videogrep.sh <video-file> <search-term> [padding-start] [padding-end]

Example:

videogrep.sh 'my_videos/owen-jones-meets-jeremy-corbyn-again.mp4' 'parliamentary' 50 85

Note: padding-start and padding-end are in milliseconds.

Produces this output:

Video file:     owen-jones-meets-jeremy-corbyn-again.mp4
Subtitle file:  owen-jones-meets-jeremy-corbyn-again.sub
Search term(s): parliamentary

Speech found:

{8748}{8780}the mind by the parliamentary Labour
{10080}{10134}parliamentary by-elections with
{10619}{10676}throughout the parliamentary party and
{12330}{12381}parliamentary speeches on the budget for
{21950}{22002}firefighting within the parliamentary
{64168}{64202}parliamentary so things will come back


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Creating: /root/videogrep_output/parliamentary__owen-jones-meets-jeremy-corbyn-again.avi
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History

The videogrep.sh script in this repo is based on a shell script from http://activearchives.org/wiki/Videogrep

Improvements I made to the original script:

• auto detect correct frame rate, dimensions and aspect ratio
• support regex searches better
• added ability to add padding around matching dialogue segments (in milliseconds)
• actually build the cut-down video as a new file, don't just play it

I used this random shell script as inspiration because antiboredom/videogrep didn't work for me. (The ffmpeg supplied by moviepy segfaults, and switching to my local ffmpeg removed all errors, but still didn't produce any output video.)