Skip to content

Quirks and Defaults

This page captures behavior that is useful in practice but easy to miss if you only skim the flag list.

Base Command

The base command used for every interaction is:

reddit-2-video

That executable name is the entrypoint for:

  • the default generation command
  • flush
  • install

Flag Negation

Flags can generally be turned off with the --no-... form.

Examples:

reddit-2-video --no-post-confirmation
reddit-2-video --no-nsfw
reddit-2-video --no-verbose

This is especially useful when you want to override a default-enabled flag such as --nsfw.

Current Command Notes

There are three top-level commands:

  • reddit-2-video
  • reddit-2-video flush
  • reddit-2-video install

The default command is the one that generates videos. flush manages visited-log state. install is a setup/bootstrap command.

Common Interactions and Contradictions

Some options affect or override each other:

Content selection

  • --subreddit is required for the default command and can be either a subreddit name or a full Reddit post URL.
  • If --subreddit is a direct Reddit post URL and --type post is used, --count is ignored and a warning is logged.
  • If --subreddit is a direct Reddit post URL and --type multi is used, the command is invalid.
  • --repeat is only used for subreddit-based generation. A direct post link resolves to one post.

End cards

  • --end-card-length is not strictly necessary unless you are using an image, as the duration can be inferred from the file itself. If provided, it will override the inferred duration.
  • If end-card duration cannot be inferred from a gif/video, the duration falls back to 5s and logs a warning.

Output and working files

  • --override controls whether existing output files are replaced automatically.

Unimplemented behavior

  • --spoiler currently exists but is not implemented; generation continues with a warning.

Voices and Lexicons

Voice and lexicon behavior is driven by checked-in config files rather than a hardcoded docs list.

Voices

Voices are loaded from:

defaults/voice.config.json

Important details:

  • --voice picks a voice by name from that config file.
  • voices can be marked as disabled which removes it from being selected when voice alternation is enabled.
  • enabling or disabling --ntts will affect whether neural tts is selected during alternation or manual selection.
  • if the requested voice is missing or incompatible, the app falls back and logs a warning

Lexicons

Lexicons are configured in:

defaults/lexicons/lexemes.config.json

The shipped lexicon files currently include:

  • censor.xml
  • abbreviations.xml

These control transformations such as censorship or abbreviation expansion during synthesis flows. You can add more lexicon files, following the AWS Polly format and including them in the lexemes config file. All listed lexicon files will be loaded into AWS polly and applied during text synthesis.

The defaults/ Directory

The defaults/ directory is the built-in asset/config bundle the app expects at runtime.

Current shipped files include:

Background Video Download and Reuse

The background video only needs to be downloaded once per YouTube video id.

When a background video is needed, the app downloads it into defaults/ using the YouTube video id as the filename. If that file already exists, later runs skip the download step and reuse the cached file instead.

That means:

  • the first run may download the background source video
  • later runs reuse the same cached source file from defaults/
  • each generation still creates its own working clip for the current output

So the source download is reused, while the per-run cut video is still regenerated for each generation.

Output Defaults

Some defaults are worth remembering:

  • default output basename is final
  • default file type is mp4
  • default framerate is 45
  • default delay between TTS clips is 1s
  • default comment count threshold is 8

Always treat the generated CLI Reference as the source of truth for current defaults, because older wiki material may describe behavior from previous iterations of the project.

Last reviewed: 2026-04-07