Video related primitives should be provided in scraperlist

[kelson42]

We are publishing more and more ZIM files with videos using many different scrapers.

Do do that we mainly:

• Re-encode videos/audio streams
• Handle sub-titles
• Display all of this using video.js

For the moment many of these pieces of video related functions are distributed in different places (in the scraper relying on them).

At least to me, this is:

• difficult to understand which scraper is at which status related to the development of these pieces of code
• Fixes will have to be requested/tracked in each scraper
• Releases are also de-facto made at very different times

I'm not prescriptive about the exact solution, but I believe we should try to consolidate this at one place.

[benoit74]

For me this is a problem of dependencies management: which software is using which version of which library.

Would a dashboard of dependencies versions per scraper help? I'm not sure it is sufficient because one still needs to know that problem x has been fixed in version x.y of dependency nnn.

What makes it even harder is that we need a solution which can handle both Python (because video re-encoding is done in scraperlib so we want to track the scraperlib version per scraper) and JS (because display is done with video.js which is ... JS).

Would it be me, I would propose a very radical solution, because the problems you describe are typically the strong argument for a mono-repo of all scrapers : all scrapers are at the same level of development, fixes have to be requested and tracked only once, releases are synchronized. Unfortunately it comes with its own share of drawbacks.

[kelson42]

@benoit74 monorepo is a nogo to me. For the rest, I'm very open. If not technical solution can be found, we should at least have a procedural approach.