scale-av-cutter

Flask application to streamline process of splitting captured day-long recordings into separate talks.

Note that if you only want to run the tools for downloading, cutting, and uploading videos, you can just install the dependencies described in that directory, instead of the dependencies for this Flask app.

Dependencies

By default, this app assumes the use of PostgreSQL as the backing database, so you must install a bunch of build tools as well Postgresql itself. If you only want to run this locally, it's far easier to just use SQLite. You can either edit requirements.txt and take out the psycopg2 requirement, or just filter it out when performing the pip install.

PostgreSQL dependencies

This section is only for if you want to use PostgreSQL as the backing database, and/or don't mind installing the psycopg2 requirement.

Install the following from your package manager.

CentOS-based:

sudo yum install postgresql postgresql-devel gcc python3-devel

Debian-based:

sudo apt install postgresql libpq-dev gcc python3-dev

Example of configuring postgresql in an Ubuntu system:

sudo su - postgres
psql
create user SOME_USER encrypted password 'SOME_PASSWORD';
create database scale_av_cutter_test;
grant all privileges on database scale_av_cutter_test to SOME_USER;

Then, you'll be able to use a SQLAlchemy string (DATABASE_URL) of postgres://SOME_USER:SOME_PASSWORD@localhost/scale_av_cutter_test.

Python dependencies

I recommend using virtualenv to manage isolate the dependencies you'll need for this project. Use either your package manager or pip to install virtualenv itself, create an environment, and activate it.

Then:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you see an error with building wheel for psycopg2, you will need to follow the PostgreSQL dependencies section first. If the error persists, file an issue.

Config

scale-av-cutter runs on environment variables. You must set these:

• SECRET_KEY: See Flask doc
• ADMIN_KEY: Group password for admin role
• REVIEWER_KEY: Group password for reviewer role
• EDITOR_KEY: Group password for editor role
• DATABASE_URL: See SQLAlchemy doc
• APP_SETTINGS: What config module to use. Pick either config.DevelopmentConfig or config.ProductionConfig

Usage

Run scale-av-cutter somewhere, like Heroku, a cloud VM, or even your local machine. Let's say you do the latter (make sure you have all of the required environment variables set).

gunicorn main:app

By default, gunicorn binds to localhost, port 8000. To open it up to the world at a specific port (e.g. 8000), run it as:

gunicorn -b 0.0.0.0:8000 main:app

You can then import all the talks of a year via the /xml endpoint, passing it a URL to the year's signxml.

curl \
  localhost:8000/xml \
  -X POST \
  -d "url=<URL OF SIGNXML" \
  -b "password=<ADMIN_KEY>"

This is safe to call repeatedly. During a convention, if descriptions or contents of certain talks update, reinvoking /xml should update it.

Now visit the index page, login as admin, and set the Youtube VID of each room-day's stream. Let your editors go wild with inputting cut times. Let your reviewers make the final tweaks or judgment of usability.

After all the input is complete, grab the set of all reviewed Done cuts:

curl \
  http://localhost:5000/json \
  -b "password=<ADMIN_KEY" \
  > approved.json

Once you have this JSON file, you can check out the tools to actually process the cuts.