Script for checking "completeness" of downloaded Youtube videosThis is a rather straightforward batch script that I put together for use with Adobe's free FLVCheck command-line utility (available here, put the exe file in the same directory as the below script). The script automates the process of checking directories with FLV/MP4 files for incompleteness (and other errors for that matter).
I wrote it primarily with downloaded Youtube playlists in mind, having far too often had the not so pleasant experience of downloading hundreds of Youtube videos in a specific playlist/series, only to notice months or even years later that a few of these files were incomplete. Of course, manually checking all the downloaded files would eliminate any such issued, but for serial downloaders of streamed Youtube (and other) media, such as myself, that's simply not a viable option due to the time it takes to manually go through every single file. The script asks you for a directory path, it then formats the directory path and sends it to FLVCheck. When FLVCheck is done, the script then processes the output by filtering out a few irrelevant/misleading warnings (such as FLVCheck not recognizing Youtube's h264+aac codec combo as a valid one). Finally, the script displays the results on-screen in an easy-to-read format as well as storing it locally as a log file for future reference (so that you can refer to the list for the videos which need to be re-downloaded). The script currently only works with one directory at a time, but I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to also add to the script an option for recursive checking of subdirectories. I haven't gone through the whole plethora of different warnings and errors that FLVCheck can report, I just sticked to the ones that most commonly occure with incomplete video downloads (read error, missing video footer). In case any other error pops up, this will be displayed but it won't be as nicely formatted on-screen, since I haven't included the appropriate lines in the code for the formatting of that particular message. For those who want to add more formatting to the error reporting, or just check out the various error codes, these are available here. BTW, Adobe's FLVCheck utility can also perform some basic repairs, but there are probably much better utilities for that and my purpose with this script was simply to verify whether the downloaded videos were ok - if not, I would simply re-download them and check the directory again with the script. Quote:
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Re: Script for checking "completeness" of downloaded Youtube videosThanks for that tool from Adobe i never knew about it and of course your script. :)
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Re: Script for checking "completeness" of downloaded Youtube videosAFAIK FLVCheck doesn't support flv with H264+AAC streams which is most common these days.
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Re: Script for checking "completeness" of downloaded Youtube videosQuote:
Though, this doesn't affect the main purpose of this particular script that I wrote, which is simply to check whether the files are complete or not (repairing them is a whole other issue, though)... |
Re: Script for checking "completeness" of downloaded Youtube videosI thought I'd also give a recommendation for KCSoftware's VideoInspector utility. It's a freeware utility that can verify the completeness of AVI, MKV, MPEG1/2 and QT files. So, basically using VideoInspector in combination with this script of mine (for FLV and MP4 files) will pretty much cover all the relevant video formats.
Once installed, just select Extra Tools -> Batch Mode, click on Add Files to add all the files that you want to check and read the results on the "Complete" column. There's also an export to file option available as well for logging the results for later reference. Just a word of warning, though, to those allergic to adware. You need to uncheck a number of pre-selected boxes for browser toolbar/homepage settings during the installation process. Also, you might want to uncheck and decline to participate in the "anonymous user statistics" participation, which is also pre-selected. Apart from these installation caveats, the program is 100% clean and free to use (if downloaded from their web page). |
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