Four Ways My Unattended Video Pipeline Died Overnight — and How I Made It Heal Itself

The morning after I lost my job, my Mac finished and filed an ASMR video. Nobody asked it to. It just ran.

In the first post, I walked through the structure of the pipeline itself — ComfyUI × FFmpeg × the Freesound API, generating long-form ASMR videos with nothing but free tools. This second post covers the other half: putting that pipeline on macOS launchd so it fires at a fixed time every day, and the self-healing logic that gets the script past the "cold start" problem, where you boot the Mac and ComfyUI simply isn't running. Two numbers do most of the work here: the ComfyUI startup wait went from 180 seconds to 600, and the Freesound download timeout went from 90 seconds to 240. Before those changes, mornings failed 2–3 days a week.

Why this setup works

The ceiling on manual work

Making a single 30-minute ambient ASMR video carefully takes 2–3 hours of hands-on time. Tuning image-generation prompts, layering the BGM, checking the loop points, building the thumbnail, filling in YouTube metadata — each step is small, but they stack up.