How to run FFMPEG commands in Django?

Question

I've spent several weeks of my free time trying to figure out this issue or search for it to no avail and I'm not sure if it is a Python or Django issue and was wondering if anyone could guide me in the right direction.

I understand uploading video files and querying them, but I am inexperienced in using FFMPEG with Django (specifically converting video to FLV). How do I call the command in Django view to convert the video and how do I do that action in between when the submit button is clicked and when it is saved the video to database.

Thank you for any help! I haven't been able to find any articles/literature on this and its killing me!

Answer 1

You can use subprocess python module to call ffmpeg once the file is uploaded.

import subprocess
subprocess.call('ffmpeg -i video.mp4 video.flv') # check the ffmpeg command line :)

ffmpeg is quite cpu intensive. You should be careful of this point on a real world web app. The subprocess call will block the app until the conversion is done (it may be long in some cases). celery can be a solution for running it as an non-blocking asynchronous task.

There are several apps for video management. I've never used one of them but I think you should have a look to django-multimedia. It seems to be what you are looking for.