The problem#
Washington state has been holding a lot of press conferences with updates about the COVID-19 situation recently. The information has always been summarized in a few slides during the video, but those slides and explanatory text are only posted separately several hours to a day later.
The solution#
youtube-dl will download videos off Twitter just
given the URL of the tweet like this one. Then clone and run
slide-detector:
./slide-detector.py video.mp4 473 105 727 397
(requires opencv-python) where video.mp4 is the
filename of the video and the relevant section of the video is a 727x397
rectangle whose top-left corner is at the coordinates (473, 105), which
is the correct rectangle to crop the linked video to just the main video
section (i.e. omitting the ASL interpreter who is always on screen).
Omit the numbers to not crop the video.
The script will output the slides as image files in the current
directory with names like static_at_3:55.jpg for the slide that
appears on the screen 3 minutes and 55 seconds into the video.