CODEWITHSUNDEEP
applescriptquicktime
stib
stib

Reputation: 3512

Is there any way of reading a timecode track of a Quicktime movie with applescript

I want to extract the timecode from a quicktime movie in Applescript.

By using this script

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    set themovie to open thefile
    set thetracks to tracks of document 1
    repeat with thetrack in thetracks
        if the kind of thetrack is "Timecode" then
            get the properties of thetrack
        end if
    end repeat
end tell

I can get the timecode track, the properties of the track are:

{is audio variable rate:true, is video gray scale:false, audio sample size:0, class:track, audio sample rate:0.0, sound balance:0, preload:false, streaming bit rate:-1.0, duration:960300, language:"English", audio channel count:0, layer:0, contents:missing value, bass gain:0, start time:0, data format:"Timecode", treble gain:0, audio characteristic:false, sound volume:0, mask:missing value, video depth:0, position:{0, 0}, id:4, high quality:false, deinterlace fields:false, href:"", natural dimensions:{0, 0}, single field:false, kind:"Timecode", index:4, data size:38412, visual characteristic:false, data rate:100, never purge:false, transparency:49, chapterlist:{}, name:"Timecode Track", alternate:{}, operation color:{32768, 32768, 32768}, enabled:true, type:"tmcd", streaming quality:-1.0, transfer mode:transfer mode unknown, dimensions:{0, 0}, current matrix:{{1.0, 0.0, 0.0}, {0.0, 1.0, 0.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}}}

none of which seems to have anything to do with the timecode. Note that the contents property is "missing value"

If I try to get the current time of the movie it returns 0, even if the timecode doesn't start at 0.

I'm thinking by what I've found on the net so far that this is impossible. Please prove me wrong

TIA -stib

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3666

Answers (2)

Ben Brown
Ben Brown

Reputation: 1

You could use the name of the track instead of kind:

on open myfiles
 repeat with thefile in myfiles

  tell application "QuickTime Player"
   set themovie to open thefile
   set thetracks to tracks of document 1
   repeat with thetrack in thetracks
    if the name of thetrack is "Closed Caption Track" then
     set thetrack's enabled to false

    end if
   end repeat
  end tell
 end repeat
end open

Upvotes: 0

stib
stib

Reputation: 3512

I found a workaround. There is an open source, command line app called timecodereader available here

Now it requires a little hacking, on line 152 of timecodereader.m you need to change the output from stderr to stdout, so that applescript can read the result. Like so:

fprintf(stderr,"%s\n", [timecodeString fileSystemRepresentation]);

to

fprintf(stdout,"%s\n", [timecodeString fileSystemRepresentation]);

once you've built it and put the result in your executable path you can just use

set theStartTC to do shell script "timecodereader /Posix/Path/To/My/Movie.mov"

it returns a string with the first frame of timecode.

Upvotes: 2

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