Dhravya

Posted on Mar 11, 2022 • Updated on Apr 1, 2023 • Originally published at dhravya.dev

Rickroll your friends with Python🐍

#tutorial #python #showdev

Yesterday, I came across a cute cat video on discord. Bored, I thought it would be really funny if I made this into a rickroll video and forward it to my friends 😂

But you see, I'm really lazy. So lazy that instead of taking 2 minutes to edit the video, I spent the next half an hour making a python program that takes in a video and returns a rickroll (Basically, it just adds the rickroll to the end of the clip).

I had no idea about Moviepy (the package i'll be using to combine the videos), so it was a great learning experience for me and I already have one more project in which i can use the experience from rickroll generator (for the hackathon 😉)

The idea is, take a clip path and save the rickroll to a folder (say, output.mp4)

class Rickroller:
    def make(self, clip_path:str):
        clip_path = self.__download_if_url(clip_path)

To maximise the amount of stuff I learn from this project, I also challenged myself to use the Rich progress bar to show the status and download videos right from URLs (which is __download_if_url function)

The download if url literally does nothing, checks if it's a valid URL and if yes, downloads and returns the path where it's been saved (More about __do_download later, which is actually downloading the stuff)

    def __download_if_url(self, url: str):
        """
        Checks if it's a URL, if yes, downloads it.
        :return: None
        """
        if url.startswith("http"):
            url = self.__do_download(url)

        return url

Now, assuming we have the clip downloaded, I load the clip_path and rickroll_path to be actual videos i could do stuff with.

Also, I added some flexibility by allowing the users to cut some of the clip at the end (because i noticed that's what's done in these rickrolls) and finally, just concatenated the clips

        clip2 = VideoFileClip(clip_path)
        clip2 = clip2.subclip(0, clip2.duration - cut_len)

        # We only want the first 15 seconds
        rickroll = rickroll.subclip(0.5, rickroll_len).resize(width=clip2.w)

        # Concatenate the two clips
        final_clip = concatenate_videoclips([clip2, rickroll], method="compose")

Here, I'm using method=compose because of a weird glitch in moviepy where it would corrupt the second clip and make a really shabby video

Also, i resize the rickroll to be as wide as the clip itself, to fix aspect ratio errors

So, here's the entire make function

    def make(
        self,
        clip_path: str,
        output_path: str = "output.mp4",
        rickroll_path: str = "rickroll.mp4",
        rickroll_len: int = 15,
        cut_len: int = 15,
    ):
        """
        Generates the rickroll itself. Essentially just concatenates the
        video clips together.
        :param clip_path: The path to the video clip to be used.
        :param output_path: The path to the output file. Default is output.mp4
        :return: None
        """

        # Check if clip_path is a URL, if yes, downloads it and changes the clip_path
        clip_path = self.__download_if_url(clip_path)
        rickroll_path = self.__download_if_url(rickroll_path )
        rickroll = VideoFileClip(rickroll_path)

        clip2 = VideoFileClip(clip_path)
        clip2 = clip2.subclip(0, clip2.duration - cut_len)

        # We only want the first 15 seconds
        rickroll = rickroll.subclip(0.5, rickroll_len).resize(width=clip2.w)

        # Concatenate the two clips
        final_clip = concatenate_videoclips([clip2, rickroll], method="compose")

        final_clip.write_videofile(output_path)

        print(f"[bold green]Rickroll saved to {output_path}[/bold green]")

Yes, I've used quite a bit of rich module here. which you'll see now, in the section that downloads videos from URLs (which might seem normal, but making the progress bar was honestly such a pain)

Downloading videos and saving with a progress bar

I knew 2 things:

I have to use requests with the stream option set to True so i could show a progress bar and save huge videos
I know nothing else

I checked the rich examples and realised I can customise the progress bar a lot

        progress = Progress(
            TextColumn("[bold blue]{task.fields[filename]}", justify="right"),
            BarColumn(bar_width=None),
            "[progress.percentage]{task.percentage:>3.1f}%",
            "•",
            DownloadColumn(),
            "•",
            TransferSpeedColumn(),
            "•",
            TimeRemainingColumn(),
        )

Now, each progress bar has a taskID assigned to it, and a context manager. I got the total length of video and then it was quite easy

        with progress:

            r = requests.get(url, stream=True)

            # Getting the content length to be marked as the total length of the download
            total = int(r.headers.get("content-length"), 0)
            with open("raw.mp4", "wb") as f:
                for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
                    if chunk:
                        f.write(chunk)
                        progress.update(task_id, total=total, completed=f.tell())

It's done now! Can be used as a simple CLI too, which is exactly what I did

if __name__ == "__main__":
    rickroller = Rickroller()

    # Can be used as a standalone script
    rickroller.make(sys.argv[1])

Just because I was bored, I also made an API for generating rickrolls, but it won't be public because IMGEN and video editing are super heavy tasks which would be costly to host

Check out the source code, API, progress bar on github here:
https://github.com/Dhravya/rickroll-maker

Star the repository if you liked it!

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Top comments (4)

Dhravya • Mar 12 '22

Thanks, I've removed it

Dhravya • Mar 11 '22

Hi there! Make sure to comment if you have any feedback, reaction, or anything. Let's start a conversation! If nothing, reply to this message with a "Hi 👋🏻"