Playing random short clips from a collection of movies

Question

I'm hosting a party, and I want to play random sequences from a collection of movies in the background. I don't want to sit and edit together five hours of footage by hand though. Ideally I would:

Play x minutes from a random point in one random movie, then play x minutes from a random point in another random movie, and so on. Any sensible scheme is fine though.

If you have any suggestions on where to start, either on Linux (preferable) or on Windows, I'd appreciate some ideas. I'm happy to script this in almost any language if needed.

Answer 1

Make a script that adds your movies in a playlist and play it in VLC. You can add start- and stop-time like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:1000,movie-clip-1.avi
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=100
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=110
movie-clip-1.avi
#EXTINF:500,movie-clip-1.avi
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=440
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=450
movie-clip-2.avi

The EXTINF-value is the movie length in seconds. VLC will add that for you if you save a playlist of all your movies.

Something like

stop-time=$[RANDOM%$length+$x]
start-time=$stop-time-$x

in a bash-script should do it.

Answer 2

Under Windows 7 you could alternatively use this Python script:

https://github.com/niknow/vlc-random-videoclip