Autodatamosh

An automatic datamoshing script for AVI videos.

Getting Started

First, install Perl if you don't have it. It's included with OS X and lots of the Linuxes, but not Windows.

After that, either clone this repo with Git or download the script directly with this link.

You're ready to break stuff!

Preparing a Video

You'll need to create an AVI video using an MPEG-4 codec. You can do that with a transcoding tool like ffmpeg, or with some video editing software.

Breaking Stuff

Once you've got the video, open up a terminal, make sure you're in the same directory as the autodatamosh.pl script, and run this:

./autodatamosh.pl -i /path/to/original.avi -o /path/to/datamoshed.avi

Replace /path/to/original.avi with the path of the video you prepared earlier, and /path/to/datamoshed.avi with the path where you want to save the datamoshed video.

That's it! Try to open the new video in a video player. I recommend VLC because it copes with how broken the datamoshed videos are really well.

What it Does

Autodatamosh automatically datamoshes MPEG-4 encoded AVI videos. Datamoshing is the process of removing image frames from a video to produce an interesting visual effect. Autodatamosh can also duplicate motion frames for a "sweeping" effect (see Examples.)

In many cases, YOU MUST RE-ENCODE VIDEOS AFTER DATAMOSHING. The method used by Autodatamosh leaves files chopped up and possibly unreadable by some video players. Youtube and video players like VLC seem to have no trouble understanding the chopped up files.

As with manual datamoshing techniques, you may also want to preserve the original audio to be recombined with the video later, since Autodatamosh brutally hacks through frames without regard for whether they contain audio data. Leaving the audio in can also be fun, however.

Usage

./autodatamosh.pl [-i FILE] [-o FILE] [-dprob N] [-dmin N] [-dmax N]

Options

• -i FILE Input file. Default is stdin.

• -o FILE Output file. Default is stdout.

• -dprob N The probability (where N is between 0 and 1) that P-frames will be duplicated when an I-frame is removed, producing a sweeping effect. Default is 0.

• -dmin N Minumum number of frames to be duplicated. The actual amount duplicated will vary randomly between this and the value of dmax. Default is 10.

• -dmax N Maximum number of frames to be duplicated. The actual amount duplicated will vary randomly between this and the value of dmin. Default is 50.

Examples

To do a standard datamosh using regular files for input and output:

./autodatamosh.pl -i input.avi -o output.avi

For some random (50%) sweeping effects between 5 and 30 frames long using stdin for the input and stdout for the output:

cat input.avi | ./autodatamosh.pl -dprob .5 -dmin 5 -dmax 30 > output.avi

There are examples of videos datamoshed by this script in this playlist.