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ergosteur 302afee062 Initial commit: iPhone Live Photo clip concatenator

Detects genuine audio/video overlap between consecutive Live Photo
clips via audio cross-correlation, trims the duplicated footage, and
re-encodes a seamless, metadata-preserving output.

2026-07-26 12:41:19 -04:00

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live-photo-concat

Concatenate sequential iPhone Live Photo .MOV clips into a single seamless, metadata-preserving video — with the real duplicate footage between clips removed.

Why

Each iPhone Live Photo .MOV captures roughly 1.5 seconds before and after its key moment. When several Live Photos are taken in quick succession (e.g. rapid-fire shutter presses), consecutive clips genuinely overlap: the same seconds of real-world video and audio get captured twice, once at the end of clip N and again at the start of clip N+1. Naively concatenating the clips repeats that footage, which shows up as an odd "loop" at each clip boundary.

This script:

Extracts the real video+audio streams from each clip (iPhone Live Photo files bundle a handful of extra HDR/depth/metadata tracks that aren't needed here).
Cross-correlates the audio at each clip boundary to measure the actual overlap duration from the content itself (not just filename order or whole-second creation timestamps, which aren't precise enough).
Trims the duplicated span off the start of each subsequent clip.
Re-encodes the video across the joins (trimming mid-GOP HEVC can't be done with a plain stream copy) and concatenates everything into one file.
Carries over the original container metadata (GPS, device info, creation time, Live Photo identifiers) from one of the source clips.

Audio stays uncompressed PCM throughout, so it never loses quality. Video quality defaults to a bitrate slightly above the source clips' own bitrate (configurable — see below).

Requirements

ffmpeg / ffprobe on PATH
Python 3 with the packages in requirements.txt:
```
pip install --user -r requirements.txt
```

Usage

./concat_live_clips.py IMG_2441.MOV IMG_2442.MOV IMG_2443.MOV ...
./concat_live_clips.py -o myvideo.mov clip1.MOV clip2.MOV ...

If -o/--output is omitted, the output filename is derived from the source filenames' numbering, e.g. IMG_2441.MOV .. IMG_2445.MOV produces IMG_2441-2445.mov.

Numbered sequence shortcuts

# bash / zsh
./concat_live_clips.py IMG_{2441..2445}.MOV

# PowerShell
python .\concat_live_clips.py (2441..2445 | ForEach-Object { "IMG_$_.MOV" })

Options

Flag	Description
`-o, --output`	Output file path (default: derived from source filenames)
`--crf N`	Use CRF (quality-based) encoding instead of the default bitrate target. Lower = higher quality; ~14-18 is near-transparent
`--bitrate RATE`	Explicit target video bitrate, e.g. `12M` or `12000k`
`--lossless`	Mathematically lossless video encoding (much larger output)
`--bitrate-multiplier N`	When auto-selecting a bitrate, multiply the source clips' peak bitrate by this (default: `1.2`)
`--bitrate-floor RATE`	When auto-selecting a bitrate, never go below this (default: `10M`)
`--preset`	x265 preset (default: `medium`)
`--metadata-from N`	Take container metadata from the Nth input clip, 0-indexed (default: `0`, the first clip)
`--confidence-threshold N`	Minimum audio cross-correlation confidence required to trust an overlap detection before falling back to 0 (default: `0.9`)

--crf, --bitrate, and --lossless are mutually exclusive; the default (no flag) auto-computes a bitrate target from the source clips.

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