smart_open VS FFmpeg

We’re using smart_open, which is an amazing library that lets you open objects in S3 (and other cloud object stores) as if they’re files on your filesystem. It’s obviously critical that we’re able to seek to an arbitrary position in an S3 file without first downloading the whole thing. We’ll assume you’re using Poetry, but you should be able to follow along with any other package manager:

If you didn’t follow along with the first article in this series, you should be able to follow this article with your own dataset as long as you install smart_open and Meadowrun. smart_open is an amazing library that lets you open objects in S3 (and other cloud object stores) as if they’re files on your filesystem, and Meadowrun makes it easy to run your Python code on the cloud.

I see that you're primarily looking into Python work, so I'd recommend `smart_open` as a nice, compact way to get started.

https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open

You want smart_open. It gives you a (more complete) file-like interface to many different storage systems, including s3. You can read and seek as needed.

See also smart_open: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open which might be more user-friendly? Never used it myself but it was on HN before. Discussion on their bugtracker: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open/issues/579

FFmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org/)

GPL2

Since FFmpeg is GPL2, doesn’t that require CompressX to disclose its source code?

IANAL, apologies if I miss understand license requirements.

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg?tab=License-1-ov-file

This turns out to be a lot of assembly macros to help write one x86 assembly. https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavutil/x86/x...

The sibling comment recommending compiler intrinsics is probably the best way to go for writing SIMD code. A mixture of `` style types and intrinsics to specify instructions is a solid 90% solution compared to assembly.

If you want that last 10%, I think macros are putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They're a somewhat easy way to build up a language abstraction which will work if held carefully, but I'm confident the dev experience using this abstraction when you write invalid code will be deeply confusing.

I would suggest to write a parser instead of the macros. That'll tell you clearly when the syntax is invalid (though possibly not with much precision) and it'll give you a place to put semantic analysis for where valid syntax encodes nonsense. Do the equivalent of the macro expansions on the parsed tree instead of on the text. Emit asm as the "back end".

You might have heard of FFMPEG or ImageMagick for image and video edition in a programmatic way. MoviePy is a Python module for video editing (Python wrapper for FFMPEG and ImageMagick). It provides functions for cutting, concatenations, title insertions, video compositing, video processing, and the creation of custom effects. It can read and write common video and audio formats and be run on any platform with Python 2.7 or 3+.

There are many cloud-based tools and websites that can convert your images, but the problem with these tools is that you usually have to upload the files for them to be processed, and some of their services are not free. In this article, I'd like to introduce a piece of software called FFmpeg, which allows you convert the images locally with one simple command.

To run the demo locally, be sure to have Python 3.11 and FFmpeg installed.