techrec/README.md

TechRec
=======

A Python2 web application that assist radio speakers in recording their shows.
Meant to be simple to install and to maintain.

It basically takes a directory with the continuous recording and create new
files "cutting/pasting" with ffmpeg.

Features
=========

* little system dependencies: python2 and ffmpeg
* The interface is extremely simple to use
* You can have nested recording (ie: to record an interview inside of a whole
  show)
* There is no user system: any user opening the website will see the complete
  status of the applications. There is, also, nothing stored in cookie or
  similar mechanisms. This means that recording a session does not require a
  browser to remain open, or any kind of persistence client-side: server-side
  does it all. It also means that authorization must be done on another layer
  (for example, your webserver could add a Basic Auth)

How does it work
================

We suppose that you have a continous recording of your radio broadcasting.
What techrec does is taking files from this directory and "cutting/pasting"
parts of them. This can boil down to something like

```sh
ffmpeg -i concat:2014-20-01-00-00.mp3|2014-20-01-00-01.mp3 -acodec copy -ss 160 -t 1840 foo.mp3
```


Implementation details
======================

It is based on bottle, to get a minimal framework. Simple APIs are offered
through it, and the static site uses them.

Jobs are not dispatched using stuff like celery, but with a thin wrapper over
`multiprocessing.Pool`; this is just to keep the installation as simple as
possible.

The encoding part is delegated to `ffmpeg`, but the code is really modular so
changing this is a breeze. To be quicker and avoid the quality issues related
to reencoding, the codec "copy" is used: this means that input and output must
have the same format.

testing
-----------

unit tests can be run with `python setup.py test`