Video Creation and Playlist
I have a fun Youtube channel call Oddbits – its some radio theatre for the mind & imagination, and some personal videos (Youtube Shorts) that I take at random. Here is the link if you’re interested.
My channel is not very popular, I’ve got 142 subscribers and a handful of videos – but that’s cool. I’m very happy with it. I guess I’m a different type of person – I classify myself as being “real”.
What I mean by this is simple, if you look at a guy like Joey B Toonz listing the video [TikTok and Idiocracy 19] – shows what passes for content these days – can you believe the artist in his video has 7.7 million followers?
For my channel I don’t want millions of subscribers, followers, etc. – personally, I really don’t care what people think of me or what they think of my channel insomuch as I’m not for everyone – the “real” people that get me will be subscribed to my channel, I don’t want the masses, I want people like me – I don’t care if they fit into the rest of society – they are important to me. In addition, to clarify – I hope the Biblical playlists I have, will resonate with everyone that wants to worship the Lord, from that perspective, I do care deeply.
But personally I don’t want to be popular, I don’t want any limelight, or attention on myself – I hate it actually. I hope the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre playlist I have on my channel is enjoyable for listening – for people that want to relax and take a momentary mental escape and take a break for themselves, unlike a movie, you can close your eyes and just listen.
It kind of makes me want to vomit when I see all these Instagram videos with scantily clad models or women that try to use their looks to get likes/followers. People trying to prove they are “fancy”, or special – trying desperately to grasp at anything to get more social relevance – I just see that as being pathetic. I taught my kids to treat others with respect and get their worth from being children of God.
I find it funny when people think being popular somehow makes them special… in my world, those types of things don’t matter at all. All the insta-crap is just superficial nonsense. Who is gonna care 20 years from now that you took a selfie or lip synced a video that got a million views? Big flipping deal lol.. 😂. But if you saved someone’s life or helped people in crisis – you accomplished something worth more than any amount of views will ever do. That’s why the people I work with at the medical clinic are very special – they are the real heroes in my world.
Back to the channel – I switched to a newer computer (for testing my work configuration) and I found that I was missing an app that I would need to re-license again. This is the app I use specifically to create the videos for the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre playlist in my Youtube channel, so its important to me. I’m trying to save money for my work budget so I used Grok to create a Python application that uses MoviePy and Tkinter – this new Python app is now a local drop-in replacement for the commercial app I had. I hardy use ChatGPT anymore and I never use Copilot, that’s for sure.
*I should explain, the app takes an mp3 file (an audio only file) in this case a radio story, and an jpg file (an image file) and creates a mp4 video file by combining the two – so that during the duration of the audio portion, presents the jpg image as the back drop for the video. I do this so I can post it on Youtube as a video; strictly speaking, I could leave it in mp3 format and mark it as a podcast, but I like that categorization of playlist files in Youtube as a visual library. And the background for the playlist is perfect. *
MoviePy is an open source library designed for video processing and Tkinter is a standard library for creating a Python GUI (graphical user interface). It’s not super fast but I don’t really care if it takes 20 minutes or more to create the video. Here is the script if you want to run it yourself.. you need to install Python 3 from the windows store and save the file on your computer, then run it like this (from a command prompt) –> python mp3_to_video.py
I’ve found Grok to be really intelligent – its a very smart AI and if you provide a well structured prompt excluding rabbit trails, it will really go a long way toward helping you out.
Have a great weekend!
Jason
