How I Built My First Video Tool in Python, and Why It Started as a Mess
Everyone says start small. My first real project was not small at all. It was a desktop tool to turn long movies…
Video Tools
The story of my first real build, a desktop video toolkit in Python and FFmpeg, from a cluttered first version to a working set of tools, including the bugs, the deletions, and the real code behind every fix.
This is a project series. The posts below are in order, starting from Part 1.
How Deleting Features Made My Video Tool Better
A few days after I built my video tool, I opened it again, not as the person who made it, but as…
Rebuilding My Video Tool’s Engine With FFmpeg Scene Detection
My tool looked cleaner now, and it was lighter underneath after cutting the scene detection library. But I had left a hole.…
The Small Feature That Got Complicated the Moment I Allowed Combinations
Once my tool could find scenes quickly, I added what felt like a tiny feature. Instead of always cutting from the middle…
The Python Bug With No Error Message That Cost Me Days
I finished adding a feature to my video tool, ran it, and something was wrong. Not wrong in the way that gives…
Adding Interval and Screenshot Modes by Reusing What I Had
By this point my tool did one thing well. It found scene changes and cut clips from them. But the more I…
Making a Tkinter App Fit Any Screen With a Scrollable Layout
Every time a tool grows, the same thing happens. The screen fills up. I had added new modes and new output types,…
Building a Second Tool to Join Clips Into Finished Videos
By now I had a tool that could pull clips out of any movie. But that was only half of what I…
Composing the Final Video, and a Preview That Saved Me
The two tools I had built, one to break a movie into clips and one to join clips together, were really steps…
The Word Automatically Was Hiding Three Hard Problems
The plan sounded easy when I said it out loud. The tool joins the clips, then adds captions automatically. One sentence. But…