Music Playlist

While the Forbidden Forest had its own set of sounds, we set up a background playlist for the common room. It was a basic playlist of all the Harry Potter film soundtracks, on shuffle: https://open.spotify.com/user/brianenigma/playlist/4iEceGLnZRdCTK5ZmpUcyV?si=xsG0L1k-SJu01dEtmdgA4g

Redesigned in 2019: now with video.

Because the audio-video setup in the living room — ahem, the Common Room — needs the TV to be on to play the Spotify music, the first run of the party had a fairly boring Spotify “now playing” screen. For the second run of the party, I figured I could do something more interesting.

If course we have all of the Harry Potter films on DVD and have long since ripped them into video files for the media center. I decided to write a little script around ffmpeg to split the movies into 1-minute chunks. From that pool of a thousand files, I deleted the front- and back-matter (credits and logos), then dumped the whole thing into the VLC player and put it on random.

The results were sometimes hilarious. At one point, I saw a scene of them dancing at the Christmas Ball while scary, intense dementor music played from the audio playlist.

Next year, I may play around with the scene-change detection in ffprobe to get more fluidly-connected scenes versus awkward and sudden cuts.