Usage

The hypershot command line tool creates screen shots of a video file, and uploads them to an image host. You can also upload existing images, using the same configuration as for the screen shots.

Demo Terminal Session

Common Options

Look at the start of the cli.py module for the most up-to-date usage information on the hypershot command, or call hypershot -h after installation.

Here is a copy of the --help output, but it might be outdated:

$ hypershot --help
Create screen shots of a video file, and upload them to an image host.

Usage:
    hypershot [options] upload <image>...
    hypershot [options] services
    hypershot [options] templates
    hypershot [options] <video>...
    hypershot (-h | --help)
    hypershot --version

Options:
    -h, --help          Show this screen.
    --version           Show version.
    --debug             Enable debugging features?
    -q, --quiet         Hide result output?
    -v, --verbose       Verbose logging?
    -n, --dry-run       Do not really upload images

    -c PATH, --config-dir=PATH
        Custom configuration directory.

    -s NAME, --service=NAME
        Select image hosting service.

    -t NAME, --template=NAME
        Select template for result formatting.

    -T PIXELS, --thumb-size=PIXELS
        Also create thumbnail with given width.

See the Configuration chapter for examples and details on all supported configuration settings. Without a configuration file, only imgur is available for uploading, and you still need to provide access credentials for that. So be sure to read this section about it.

--help and --version print usage and version information, as usual.

--debug activates detailed logging (level DEBUG), and in case of errors also prints full Python tracebacks where normally a simple one-line message is shown.

--quiet hides any result output, so that only the clipboard is filled.

--verbose raises the logging level from the default WARNING to INFO. It also enables progress indicators, whatever the configuration says, unless combined with --no-progress.

--dry-run prevents image uploading and writing to disk – although screen shots are written to /tmp anyway.

Generating and Uploading Screen Shots

If you feed hypershot with a list of video files, they’re first inspected using mediainfo. Then the requested number of screen shots is taken, evenly spaced over the video’s duration but starting with a small offset. If only one is requested, it is taken from smack in the middle.

After uploading the generated images, the resulting links are fed into a Jinja2 template. To list all available templates, call hypershot templates.

Output of ‘hypershot templates’

Use --template to select one from the list, or set a default in your configuration. For more details, see Templating of Upload Results.

Uploading Existing Images

Besides taking screenshots, you can also upload existing image files explicitly, via the upload sub-command. The image links are also fed into the result template, but no videofile or mediainfo values are available (the videos value is empty and thus logically False, so you can check on that in a template).

Rehosting is also possible, by passing https, http or ftp URLs.