Destilate

Detect static parts in videos and remove them using ffmpeg.

Requirements

• Python
• ffmpeg

Description

The script trims the input file in two steps:

1. run ffmpeg's mpdecimate filter against the input video to find successive frames that mpdecimate considers similar based on default or user-provided parameters
2. remove the frames using ffmpeg either via copy and concatenation (default, fast) or by reencoding the original video using a complex filter (slow)

When removal of static parts is done via copy and concatenation, intervals are aligned to keyframes in a way to maximize the number of frames kept. This mode should work well enough for most cases.

Removal of static parts by reencoding is done without aligning intervals to keyframes first, and therefore can produce more accurate results. It's generally slower and has potential for quality loss, but that can be controlled via encoding arguments that are passed through to ffmpeg.

If the script doesn't work as desired by default, try adjusting mpdecimate parameters and arguments for your needs.

Minimum durations of parts to keep or drop are also customizable. Note that they are checked before any alignment.

Refer to ./destilate -h for parameter defaults and basic CLI documentation.

Examples

Remove static parts from input.mp4 using default settings without reencoding, save the output to trimmed_input.mp4.

$ ./destilate input.mp4

Same, but with reencoding (--mode filter) and custom encoding arguments. If the output file already exists, the script will replace it without asking (-y, or --yes).

$ ./destilate input.mp4 \
    --mode filter \
    --encoding-args='-c:v libx264 -preset slow' \
    -y

Trim input file using custom mpdecimate parameters (--params, or -p) and arguments (--args), only keeping non-static parts longer than half a second, and removing static parts longer than two seconds. Output file is specified explicitly.

$ ./destilate input.mp4 \
    --params 'hi=300:lo=200:frac=1:max=0' \
    --args='-max_muxing_queue_size 1024' \
    --min-keep 0.5 \
    --min-drop 2 \
    /path/to/output/file.mp4