Does Google App Script have something akin to ffmpeg?

[Josh Dalton]

Hey guys, just wondering, does Google App Script have something akin to ffmpeg for converting an array of png blobs to a single mp4/gif/animation? 

I'm wondering as I'm trying to create myself a sort of Line Race Chart (without creating a html page that is, just a plain mp4 file containing said line race chart) with every frame being the next value in a google spreadsheet array.

Basically, I want to take "screenshots" of the chart, and when I'm finally done with the array, collate them into a single mp4 or any video file (anything that can be easily paused and played pretty much, with no autoplaying).

No worries if it isn't available, I'm just concerned if my only route is somehow converting them manually with bytecode (which I currently don't have a clue to do, as all answers on the internet have been to "find a library", which is sorta hard when working with Google App Script).

[Martin Hawksey]

Hi - route I would be going down would be looking at a suitable JS library that can handle web browser based image to gif conversion. Not aware of an existing implementation in Google Apps Script

You could probably shortcut the 'make a gif' bit by using the Creator Studio add-on which turns Google Slides into animations/video https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/creator_studio/509621243108  For this you would then just be looking for a way to add each chart frame to a Google Slide deck (an example for animating a Google Sheets chart is here https://medium.com/@milton.slonim/how-to-create-gifs-with-google-sheets-and-apps-script-1ed9b1606b5

Interested to hear how you get on with this idea :)

[Clark Lind]

Have you considered just animating the chart itself? I know this doesn't answer your question and may not meet your requirements, but charts does have some animation features. 

[Bruce Mcpherson]

For some aspects of this project

https://sites.google.com/view/totallyunscripted/previous-episodes/specials/tu-special-using-the-google-video-intelligence-api?authuser=0

I used this

https://www.npmjs.com/package/fluent-ffmpeg

running in a docker image in Kubernetes, but you could more easily use cloud run for a simpler environment. You could then access by loading your files to google cloud storage, and invoking cloud run via apps script to do ffmpeg kind of things.

It's a lot of work stitiching all this together, but it'll give you a full ffmpeg instance to run whenever you need to

You might also find this useful to get stuff from Drive to cloud storage

https://ramblings.mcpher.com/gcp/file-drive-and-cloud-storage/

On Monday, 21 March 2022 at 09:03:10 UTC dalto...@gmail.com wrote:

[Brian Berneker]

This doesn't sound to me like an apps script solution, but can be done using JavaScript libraries.

Doing it with WEBP
https://www.npmjs.com/package/webp-converter

Doing it with MP4 using a worker
https://gist.github.com/ilblog/5fa2914e0ad666bbb85745dbf4b3f106

On Monday, March 21, 2022 at 5:03:10 AM UTC-4 dalto...@gmail.com wrote:

[dimud...@gmail.com]

Its possible. The V8 version of GAS has partial support for WebAssembly. So if you can find a WASM port of ffmpeg, you'll be able to build what you need directly in GAS. Far easier said than done though.