Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python

> playsound

This library is unfortunately effectively abandoned -- it hasn’t received any updates in over four years, and its latest version doesn’t work at all: https://github.com/TaylorSMarks/playsound/issues/101

(A workaround exists: downgrading to version 1.2.2, but that comes with its own issues.)

The last time I experimented with audio in Python, I was surprised by how lacking its multimedia libraries are.

For example, when I needed to read audio files as data, I tried `SoundFile`, `librosa` (a wrapper around `SoundFile` or `audioread`), and `pydub`, and none of them was particularly satisfying or has seen much active development lately.

If you need to read various formats, pydub is probably your best bet (it does this by invoking ffmpeg under the hood). I was hoping for a more "native" solution, but oh well. Unfortunately, `pydub` is also unmaintained and has some serious performance issues (for example: https://github.com/jiaaro/pydub/issues/518 )

> Playing a video file from your Python program is complicated.

You can use PySide6. Here is an example:

    import sys
    from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QVBoxLayout
    from PySide6.QtMultimedia import QMediaPlayer, QAudioOutput
    from PySide6.QtMultimediaWidgets import QVideoWidget
    from PySide6.QtCore import QUrl


    class VideoPlayer(QWidget):
        def __init__(self):
            super().__init__()
            self.setWindowTitle("Video Player - video.mp4")
            self.resize(800, 600)

            # Layout
            layout = QVBoxLayout()
            self.setLayout(layout)

            # Video widget
            self.video_widget = QVideoWidget()
            layout.addWidget(self.video_widget)

            # Media player
            self.media_player = QMediaPlayer(self)
            self.audio_output = QAudioOutput(self)
            self.media_player.setAudioOutput(self.audio_output)
            self.media_player.setVideoOutput(self.video_widget)

            # Load video file
            self.media_player.setSource(QUrl.fromLocalFile("video.mp4"))

            self.media_player.play()


    if __name__ == "__main__":
        app = QApplication(sys.argv)
        player = VideoPlayer()
        player.show()
        sys.exit(app.exec())

I learned Python from your Udemy course of the same name. Congrats on the new edition of the book!

Love it, that's where I direct all our new hires who want to pick up the basics of Python. I'll be reading this chapter myself this weekend too.

I'm curious why you didn't end up including this material?

This is fantastic. I've gotten so much out of cv2 and Python, and just a perusal of the page suggests that there's lots more to learn.

One of my favorite programming books of all times. Cheers Al!

I was never able to get my head around programing despite my interest over the years. But LLM and python scripts in the last 3-4 years have changed my life.

And a transit nerd supporter!