MastodonFrameBot

A fork of Every Frame In Order Bot by pigeonburger

What is it?

A Python script allowing you to run your own Mastodon bot that posts every frame of a TV show.

I run a bot using this code on my Mastodon instance under the account @amityisland, which posts 5 frames from the movie "Jaws" every half hour (modified the movie naming convention to make it look like a TV show). That account is a good demonstration of what this program does.

pigeonburger also created the setup script (setupbot.py) which will automatically split the show into the frames and create the database necessary for storing info for the bot, which makes things go a lot quicker.

If you make an account running this bot, crediting @pigeonburger somewhere in the bio/pinned toot and shooting me (@cfultz) a toot would be cool! Would love to see your bots!

Requirements

• A cool TV show (or movie)
• Some sort of server/computer that runs 24/7
• Python version >=3.6
• Mastodon.py (install using pip install -U Mastodon.py)
• A Mastodon account with an access token (with Write permissions) placed in token.secret.
• FFmpeg (only for initial setup - splitting the show into frames)

Setup

1. First, you need a TV series downloaded onto your computer (e.g. as .mp4 files). Put every single episode from every season all in one single folder all together.

   If the video files you have are not in the mp4 format, change line 10 of setupbot.py to the relevant extension (e.g. *.mkv)

2. Download the setupbot.py and mastodon_bot.py files from here, and place them in the same folder as all the TV show episodes.

3. Run the setupbot.py file. This program will split all the videos into their individual frames (default 1fps), placing them all inside a folder called frames, and enter some details into a database file called framebot.db, which is required for the Twitter bot to run.

   Video processing is very CPU-intensive, so depending on the speed of your computer, this script may take a while to complete. Once it finally does finish running, you can delete the video files if you want.

4. Open the mastodon_bot.py file for editing, and enter in your Twitter account's Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret. Also enter the name of the show by updating the show_name variable a bit further below.

5. The bot is now ready to run! You'll need to use a program like Cron on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows to execute mastodon_bot.py every however many minutes you want. By default, the bot will post 5 frames from the show every time the script is run.

License

This code is released under the GNU GPLv3 license.