Introduction ============ What it Does ------------ Look at one or more video files, taking screen shots without any human interaction, uploading the results to an image hosting service, and finally produce some text output containing links to the images. That output can be used for posting to forums, blogs, etc. You can also upload existing images, using the same configuration as for the screen shots. *hypershot* is designed for and tested on *Linux*, and it is expected and supported to run on *Mac OSX* (report any issues you might encounter). It *might* run on *Windows*, if you use *CygWin/Babun*, *Ubuntu for Windows*, or one of the *Docker* distributions for *Windows*. How it Works ------------ *hypershot* looks at a video file using *mediainfo*, and then decides on the offsets for the screen shots, depending on how many you requested and the duration of the video. It then calls an external script or command to take those screenshots – a default script using *mplayer*, *ffmpeg* or *avconv* is provided. The resulting images are then uploaded to a configured image hoster, and the returned URLs plus the mediainfo data are fed into a templating engine. This way you can generate HTML, BBcode, Markdown, or whatever (text) format you need. Then take the final result and post your screen shots on the web – for your convenience, it's already in your paste buffer. See :doc:`usage` for more details, and the :doc:`following chapter ` on how to install the necessary software.