[ColinGPT9]

Fixes the cause of #197. Longform failed every time on a video titled "First Time. Surely I'll be fine. Let's skip the tutorial", with FFmpeg unable to open …/First Time. Surely Ill.

Cause

• Folder names: clip folders are named after the video's title, apostrophes included.
• The listing: every join without re-encoding (video/encoding.py concat()) hands FFmpeg a listing of file '<path>' lines.
• No escaping: nothing escaped a quote inside a path, so FFmpeg read each path only up to the apostrophe and found nothing.

Four places wrote those lines:

Writer	With an apostrophe in the title
longform/assemble.py	The job fails. This is #197.
video/outro.py, append() and finish()	The end card's join fails quietly. The clip is remuxed without its card, so every clip of such a video had no end card. That's why the reporter's other clips "worked fine".
sports/core/reels.py	The story reel fails.

Fix

• One helper: video/encoding.py concat_entry() writes each line. It closes, escapes and reopens a quote ('\''), as FFmpeg's quoting spells it. A path without a quote is written exactly as before.
• All four writers use it.
• A guard: a test fails if any other Python file writes a file '{…}' line itself.

Checked

End to end, in a folder named like the reporter's. It used a real 1080p60 source and the real end card:

	End card	Longform
main	skipped: clip 5.00 s, no card	concat join failed … No such file or directory (#197)
this PR	added: 7.90 s (5 s + 2.9 s card)	made: 10.90 s

Tests, in tests/test_video_join.py; CI runs them, and the real joins skip without FFmpeg:

• the escaping, and an unchanged line for a path without a quote;
• a real join in the reporter's folder name, where the old listing fails and the new one joins 6 s;
• the guard.

Local runs:

• ruff is clean.
• test_outro, test_outro_join, test_video_join, test_sports_reels and test_selection_longform all pass in the full environment.
• In the CI-light venv, everything passes except three SDK new tests, which fail the same way on unchanged main inside a Windows venv.

Refs #197

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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