Further automation automation
On a few of my Europa Universalis series, I’ve used a quick little python script to do take care of some of the predictable elements of the series — tags, title and video number — and work out a schedule.
Having gone through the process of uploading a lot of Dead by Daylight videos in the past, and with a large and growing set of Hunt: Showdown videos building up it seems like a good time to start adapting that script.
There is a significant hidden assumption here: my video file names are in ISO 8601 format, so we can sort based on filename.
As the previous uses had been EUIV videos the parameters were coded in as variables. This is obviously undesirable for a general-purpose script, so we need some way of passing in the things we want. And since we’re outputting JSON, why not use JSON formatting for the parameters file too?
We look for a supplied directory and file pattern, and pass those to glob.glob to be os.path.join-ed to build the file list. We then use a sorted() copy of the list which will have the videos in the correct — see assumption — order for the playlist.
Iterating through this sorted list, we can set the basics that uploadytfootage expects.
The only ‘fancy’ work here is in figuring out the schedule dates. Quoting my own docstring:
"""Based on:
- the current scheduled date
- valid days [M,Tu,W,Th,F,Sa,Su]
- valid times (eg [1600, 1745, 2100])
return the next scheduled date"""I debated whether to make this a generator; and in the end I avoided it for reasons I can’t quite remember.
First we look at hours: if there’s a valid time later in the current day, use that. If not, we set the new hours part to the earliest of the valid times.
Next, days: if there’s a valid day of the week in the current week, set it to the next one. If not, take the difference of the current day and the earliest valid day away from 7 and add that to get the new day. That one might need a bit of explaining:
Valid: Monday (1) || Current: Friday (5):
7 – (5 – 1) = 3.
Using 3 for the days component of the timedelta gives us the Monday following the current Friday. We can also set the hours and minutes component of the time in that timedelta object.
Then it’s simply a matter of returning the value of the current scheduled date plus the timedelta!
In addition, I skip changing the scheduled date for any video that has “part” in the filename; on the basis that if it’s just been split for length — such as a three hour EUIV video split into hour segments — the different parts should all go out on the same day.
Having all the dates in the schedule figured out and set automatically is a huge timesaver.
The JSON provided by genjson is valid as uploadytfootage goes; but the only things that really need done are setting a title (if the videos in the series have different titles; EUIV playlists tend not to, Hunt ones do), a description, a thumbnail title and a thumbnail frame time.
Doing those few things are much quicker than redoing the metadata for each and every video.