Introduction

• Objective : To set your video/audio settings once, and then to encode a batch of videos automatically.
• It’s not at all intuitive.
• The program is old and has changed multiples times, so there is a lot of documentation and forum chitchat about APIs which don’t exist anymore.
• It is said that the program is GUI oriented, but in fact it is fully scriptable.

That being said, up to my knowledge, there are 2 APIs :

• the command line. I didn’t find a up-to-date documentation for it on the official website, but you can have it using the command line avidemux_cli.exe --help
• tinypy scripting (cf http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php?id=using:tinypy )

The official documentation has an example in full tinypy (with lots of implicit procedures) , but if like me, you don’t feel confident in tinypy, the easiest way is to mix automatically-generated tinypy and another scripting language using the command line.

 Generation of a tinypy configuration file

• Open in avidemux one of the files to encode and setup every parameter (video & audio) for the job.
• Export all your settings as a tinypy script : File -> Project Script -> Save As Project

  

• This will give you something like this (but with more settings...) #PY <- Needed to identify # #--automatically built-- adm = Avidemux() adm.loadVideo("C:/Users/user1/Documents/LMDMF/FRED.ET.CIE.(LMDMF).mp4") adm.clearSegments() adm.addSegment(0, 0, 743440000) adm.markerA = 0 adm.markerB = 743440000 adm.videoCodec("Copy") adm.audioClearTracks() adm.setSourceTrackLanguage(0,"unknown") adm.audioAddTrack(0) adm.audioCodec(0, "copy"); adm.audioSetDrc(0, 0) adm.audioSetShift(0, 0,0) adm.setContainer("MKV", "forceDisplayWidth=False", "displayWidth=1280")

 Cleaning the tinypy

• We remove the loading part because the command line will do it.
• Remove adm.loadVideo("C:/Users/user1/Documents/LMDMF/FRED.ET.CIE.(LMDMF).mp4") adm.clearSegments() adm.addSegment(0, 0, 743440000) adm.markerA = 0 adm.markerB = 743440000

• So we have something like that (you may read the tinypy doc if some function are unclear). I will name this new file settings.py. #PY <- Needed to identify # #--automatically built-- adm = Avidemux() adm.videoCodec("Copy") adm.audioClearTracks() adm.setSourceTrackLanguage(0,"unknown") adm.audioAddTrack(0) adm.audioCodec(0, "copy"); adm.audioSetDrc(0, 0) adm.audioSetShift(0, 0,0) adm.setContainer("MKV", "forceDisplayWidth=False", "displayWidth=1280")

 Calling avidemux for the command line

• Of course, change everything to fit your paths. Also, while scripting, I had some unclear errors (probably of my own) of "file not found", and I had to give to avidemux the full path for each file.
• Now, you just have to write some automation in your favorite scripting language...
• When you finish you script, you may call instead avidemux_cli.exe to hide the GUI and with the >nul operator to silent it... "C:\Program Files\Avidemux 2.7 - 64 bits\avidemux_cli.exe" --load "d:\input_video.mp4" --run "d:\settings.py" --save "output_video.mkv" --quit >nul