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Vidify

Watchmusic videos in real-time for the songs playing on your device

A lighter and less dev-oriented version of this README can be found atvidify.org. The official site also has translations available.

• Installation
  • The APIs
  • The Players
    • The External Player
  • Audio Synchronization
• Usage and configuration
• FAQ
• Development resources
  • Tests
  • Current Limitations

Vidify is intended to be modular. By default, it includes support for the most popular music players (a.k.a.APIs). Same goes for thevideo players (currently,VLC by default). This can be extended by installing the required dependencies listed in their sections.

Here are the different ways to install Vidify, depending on your Operating System:

• Cross-platform: Withpip:pip install --user vidify. Optional APIs and Players can be installed withpip install --user vidify[extra1,extra2], which is equivalent to installing the list of dependencies needed forextra1 andextra2.
• Windows or Linux: Using the binaries from thelatest stable releases. These include support for all optional APIs, and use mpv as the player.
• Linux:
  • Arch Linux: you can install it from the AUR:vidify. Maintained by me (marioortizmanero).
  • Gentoo Linux: there's an ebuild maintained byAndrewAmmerlaan in the main repository atmedia-video/vidify:emerge vidify
  • Feel free to upload it to your distro's repositories! Let me know in an issue so that I can add it to this list.

Note: Vidify requires Python >= 3.6.

An API is simply a source of information about the music playing on a device. For example, the Spotify desktop client, or iTunes. Here are the currently supported ones:

* The name inside parenthesis is used as a key for thearguments and theconfig options.--api mpris_linux would force using the Linux Media Players API, for instance. It's also used for the extra dependencies installation with pip:pip install vidify[extra1] would install all the extra requirements forextra1 with pip.

The embedded video players inside the app. The default one is VLC because it's more popular, but you can use others if you have the player itself installed, and the Python extra dependencies.

For now, the only way to specify what player to use is witharguments or inside theconfig file with the internal name. You can use--player mpv or save it in your config file for future usage:

[Defaults]player = mpv

The external player lets you play Vidify's music videos essentially anywhere. It will send all the music video information to an external application. Here are the current implementations:

• Vidify TV: available on Android, Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick TV.Play Store page.

Vidify has an audio synchronization feature. The full repository is invidify/audiosync. It's still Work-In-Progress.

Audiosync is only available on Linux for now. It's strongly recommended to use Mpv as the video player. You can install it withpip install vidify[audiosync], along with the following dependencies:

• FFTW:libfftw3 on Debian-based distros.
• ffmpeg:ffmpeg on most repositories. It must be available on your path.
• pulseaudio:pulseaudio, pre-installed on most repos.
• yt-dlp: this is installed by default with Vidify, but make sure it's available on your path.

It's also available asvidify-audiosync on the AUR, and it comes pre-installed in the binaries.

It can be activated with--audiosync, or inside yourconfig file:

[Defaults]audiosync = true

You can calibrate the audiosync results with the option--audiosync-calibration oraudiosync_calibration. By default it's 0 milliseconds, but it may depend on your hardware.

Note: if when using audiosync there's no sound, you might need to disable stream target device restore by editing the corresponing line in/etc/pulse/default.pa toload-module module-stream-restore restore_device=false.

Note 2: you should make sure that the sink being recorded is eitheraudiosync, or the one where the music is playing. Here's an example on Pavucontrol (it's usually called 'Monitor of ...'):

The app has an interface that will guide you through most of the set-up, but you can use command line arguments and the config file for more advanced options (and until the GUI is completely finished):

usage: vidify [-h] [-v] [--debug] [--config-file CONFIG_FILE] [-n] [-f] [--dark-mode] [--stay-on-top]              [--width WIDTH] [--height HEIGHT] [-a API] [-p PLAYER] [--audiosync]              [--audiosync-calibration AUDIOSYNC_CALIBRATION] [--vlc-args VLC_ARGS]              [--mpv-flags MPV_FLAGS] [--client-id CLIENT_ID] [--client-secret CLIENT_SECRET]              [--redirect-uri REDIRECT_URI]

The configuration file is created by default at your usual config directory:

• Linux:~/.config/vidify/config.ini (or in$XDG_CONFIG_HOME, if defined)
• Mac OS X:~/Library/Preferences/vidify/config.ini
• Windows:C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\vidify\vidify\config.ini

You can use a custom one by passing--config-file <PATH> as an argument. The config file is overriden by the configuration passed as arguments, but keeps your settings for future usage.Here's an example of one. It uses theINI config file formatting. Most options are inside the[Defaults] section.

All the available options for the config file are the same as the arguments listed in theUsage section, except for--config-file <PATH>, which is only an argument. Their names are the same but with underscores instead of dashes. For example,--use-mpv would be equivalent touse_mpv = true.

PySide2 started supporting Python 3.8 with the 5.14 release. Make sure you're using an updated version and try again.TypeError: 'Shiboken.ObjectType' object is not iterable will be raised otherwise.

For some reason,python-gobject may not be available inside a virtual environment. You can create a symlink inside it with:

ln -s"/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/gi""$venv_dir/lib/python3.8/site-packages"

or install it with pip followingthis guide.

If the song doesn't have a metadata field with its title and artist (the latter is optional), Vidify is unable to know what song is playing. Try to modify the metadata of your downloaded songs with VLC or any other tool.

Make sure that both Python and VLC are either 32 bits, or 64 bits, but not different. You should have a directory calledC:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC (32b), orC:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC (64b).

If Vidify is not playing any videos, and is throwing 403 Forbidden errors (with the--debug argument). The YouTube-DL cache has likely become corrupt or needs to be regenerated because of other reasons, please try deleting~/.cache/youtube-dl.

Helpful documentation links for contributing:

• DBus,pydbus,MPRIS,Qt for Python.
• python-vlc,python-mpv.

The app logo was created byxypnox in thisissue.

The changelog and more information about this program's versions can be found in theReleases page.

The Vidify external player has an open protocol for anyone to implement their own app or program to play the videos. You can read more about how it works in thiswiki article.

You can run the module locally withpython -m vidify.

This project usesunittest for testing. Run them withpython -m unittest. You'll need all the extra dependencies installed for this to work.