10.6: Use the pcastaction command to manipulate video files

The command pcastaction is a tool included in Snow Leopard to manipulate QuickTime and MPEG movies in a lot of ways: trim, append, extract soundtrack, watermark, and so forth.

The command is used by Podcast Capture to handle video to send to a MacOSX Server (Podcast Producer) but can also be used standalone. It is written in Ruby and uses Apple QTKit.

A few preliminary notes:

All paths must be absolute (start from /). You can use `pwd` (with back quotes) in a shell to specify current directory path (see examples below).
Most commands create 'reference movies' (with references to other files) which are not self-sufficient and can break if you move the original files. You should 'flatten' these with pcastaction or open them in QuickTime Player and save them to get a fully independent movie.

Here are a few examples usage of the command:

Get info

pcastaction qtinfo --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie.mp4
pcastaction qtinfo --prb=/Users/john/Movies/ --input=/Users/john/Movies/movie.mp4

Extract soundtrack to 'movieaudio.m4a' file:

pcastaction extracttracks --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie.mp4 --output=`pwd`/movieaudio.m4a --type=audio

Extract soundtrack to file: movie.m4v:

pcastaction extracttracks --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie.mp4 --output=`pwd`/movie.m4v --type=video

Put an audio track in a video:

pcastaction addtracks --prb=`pwd` --tracks=`pwd`/movieaudio.m4a --input=`pwd`/movie.m4v --output=`pwd`/movie_av.mp4

Extract a png image from movie at time (in seconds, with decimals possible):

pcastaction getposterimage --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie.mp4 --output=`pwd`/movie_pic.png --time=120.20

Trim a movie (times in seconds with decimals):

pcastaction trim --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie.mp4 --output=`pwd`/movie_trimmed.mp4 --start_time=10.10 --end_time=1250.30

Join (put one after the other) movies (if sizes don't match the biggest size will be used and the smaller video wil be put in top left corner):
```
pcastaction join --prb=`pwd` --input1=`pwd`/movie1.mp4 --input2=`pwd`/movie2.mp4 --output=`pwd`/movie_joined.mp4
```

Flatten (make a self-contained movie):

pcastaction flatten --prb=`pwd` --input=`pwd`/movie_av.mov --output=`pwd`/movie_av_flatten.mov

For more options you can type in the Terminal:

pcastaction help (lists all subcommands)

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

$ pcastaction help shell Podcast Producer action task, version 2.0 Copyright 2007 Apple, Inc. shell: run a command with the specified arguments usage: shell --basedir=BASEDIR -- EXECUTABLE_PATH [args...]

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10.6: Use the pcastaction command to manipulate video files
Authored by: prichardson on Apr 09, '11 11:09:44AM

Why?

Apple has a neat little guide here: http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/Podcast_Producer_Admin_v10.6.pdf

10.6: Use the pcastaction command to manipulate video files
Authored by: michelj on Aug 06, '12 11:15:34AM

Still works in 10.7 but has been removed as of 10.8 mountain lion (as podcast client is gone)

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