Background: Since upgrading from Win10 to Win11, Python, Pymovie and Pyote stopped working. My other apps from Win10 all survived the upgrade without trouble. But Python ended up in a Twilight Zone - I could find the Python 3.10 icon in my list of apps, and clicking it did bring me into a Python window with the familiar >>> prompt. But no commands issued from >>> nor from the DOS cmd > prompt would give any other response than "Python not found". Nor would right-clicking on the Python 3.10 icon give me a "properties" option which I could click to then find where the Python files were being stored. Nor could searching within c:\users\drrick\AppData (which is a hidden directory; I had to just go there, via DOS. It would not display as a folder but I could DOS "cd" command still go to it and DOS "dir" would show me what's there) locate anything related to Python. All my other apps seemed to have folders within AppData, but not Python or any python programs. Others seemed to have similar trouble. Especially for total newbies, it's really helpful to have a cookbook that takes almost nothing for granted, so here goes...
My guess is that a PATH got broken somewhere somehow. But I do not know for sure what broke. Eventually, I gave up and decided to re-install Python 3.10, PyMovie and PyOTE from scratch. Here's what I did, and it worked in the end... do the following:
( I use * as a "bullet", don't be typing in * to the lines below that tell you what to type at the prompts > or >>>)
1. To Uninstall Python:
*Click on the lower left "Windows" icon and list apps, then click on the "all" so it will then give a complete list of my apps.
*
Located Python 3.10 icon and right-click and "uninstall". This took about 30s to finally complete the uninstallation.
2. To Re-Install Python 3.10. Bob Anderson says that all Python versions of Python 3.10 will work with Pymovie/Pyote, not just the 3.10.9 that I had in my Win10 OS. So...
*Click the lower left corner "Windows" icon.
*Click on the app = "Microsoft Store". You do not need to have or to create a Microsoft account to use the store, so don't be lured there if you don't want to.
* in the MS Store window, do not use the "search" field to search for Python 3.10. For me, it listed only Python 3.12 and above. Newer Python's will not work with PyMovie and Pyote. Instead, in the MS Store window, go to the lower left corder and the bookshelf icon that says "library" and click that, to get to the older versions. You should see Python 3.10 .
* Click on the product name Python 3.10.
For me, it said "this product is not currently available, try again later". I couldn't believe it. So... I then instead clicked on the little cloud with the downarrow which is on the same line. This did work; I saw a little blue spinning wheel as it downloaded Python 3.10 and gave a running status of how many megabytes it was at. It took about 30s on my slow internet to download the 39 MB.
3. To verify that Python was Installed and check the version installed
* open a DOS window (the CMD prompt, which should be under "Windows apps"); that should bring up a small black window and the c:> prompt. At the prompt...type
>python --version
* Success! Instead of "python cannot be found", it now says "Python 3.10.11". Your version may vary. I was not given a choice of which sub-version of Python 3.10 that I could download, or if there was a choice, I did not find or see how. But PyMovie author Bob Anderson told me on Dec 20, 2025 that all sub-versions of Python 3.10 work fine with Pymovie/Pyote. At that moment, there were versions on the Python foundation website listing 3.10 versions up to Python 3.10.19.
4. Update PIP. PIP is the program installation program for Python. I thought it best to make sure my PIP was up to date. So, do that by the following on the DOS CMD line:
>python -m pip install --upgrade pip
It came back with "installing collected packages: pip" and also a yellow warning, that pip.exe, pip3.10.exe and pip3.exe are all in c:\User\drrick\AppData (and then a long string of more letters ending in ...scripts.) and that this folder is not in the current PATH. You will want it in your PATH, so I did the DOS append PATH command...
>path c:\users\drrick\AppData(etc! I won't type out the rest of the long folder name, but it's the full path to the directory that has the pip executables) ; %path%
5. Install the Python Wheel code. Why? Wheel is apparently a code that makes faster and more efficient the installation of Python packages. The IOTA .docx file describing how to install Pymovie and Pyote say we should install the Wheel, so I did. It's not big, just 72kb and installing it goes very fast. At the DOS cmd line....
> pip install wheel For me, it then came back with "successfully installed wheel-0.45.1"
6. Install Pymovie For me, this took about 5 minutes. It gave a verbose list of all the packages it was installing, including numpy, astropy and many many more. Included in the long list of packages was "pymovie 4.1.5". Very good. Now we build the bytecode for Pymovie. This must be done inside Python. So we need to invoke Python from the CMD prompt and then tell it to build pymovie...
>python
>>> from pymovie import main
this took about 30s, silently, and then you should get the >>> prompt back when it is done. This build is cached and so it should only have to be done once, unless you clear cache at some point in your computer adventures.
7. Launch Pymovie launch pymovie just to make sure it works. We'll create shortcuts to put on your desktop later, to streamline this
>>> main.main() this launches Pymovie and you should see the normal big white boxes of Pymovie
9. Install Pyote You will want to start this like you did Pymovie - from the DOS CMD prompt, so you need to exit Python...
>>>exit()
Now you can install pyote
> pip install pyote
This should take a few minutes as it again, verbosely, installs Pyote and all the needed packages. For me, for some strange reason, it finds the same packages we just installed for Pymovie, and it uninstalls them then re-installs them. You should see in the list of installed packages one that says Pyote . My version was Pyote 5.7.11. If so, it was a success. Now we must build the bytecode for PyOTE. Again, this is cached so it should only have to be done once.
> python
>>> from pyoteapp import pyote
This took about a minute to complete. Now ready to test that Pyote works. To start up Pyote, type at the >>> prompt
>>>pyote.main()
10. Add desktop icons for PyMovie and PyOTE
Now, for me, my old desktop shortcuts for Pymovie and Pyote worked once again! Very good. But if you don't have desktop shortcuts, then do the following.
*
Open Windows File Explorer and navigate to the unzipped files you downloaded from the IOTA website. Locate the file python-logo.ico, Clean_Python_PyMovie.bat, and Clean_Python_PyOTE.bat files (you may not see the .bat extensions if you have not enabled the display of file extensions).
*
Copy these files into your C:\Users\[xxxx] folder.
*
Next, right-click on the highlighted PyMovie.bat file and select Create Shortcut, do the same for PyOTE and Python.
If you've had OCR files created, your re-installation of PyMovie will mean those files are gone and you'll have to create them again. I'll note just one pathology of my situation because perhaps some others have encountered this: When I was using a camcorder to record my video on miniDV, I could train the OCR and it would always work. When I switched to Startech analog->digital recording on my laptop, even after re-training, the OCR is very poor. I get about 10 -50% of my time stamps correctly OCR'd and so I have to do manual time stamps for every video I do. It's a hassle, but I don't know the solution. Maybe it's very sensitive to the variable recording brightnesses you can choose in IOTA VC2.4 ?