How to grab an individual frame from a video on Linux

Another usage for ffmpeg, but this time it is an undocument feature (grrr) that I found here: Re: ffmpeg frames extraction.

How to pull, grab, or scrape a single (or more!) image file from a video file:

ffmpeg -i videofile.avi -ss 13 -vframes 1 output_%d.png

-i videofile.avi
input file
-ss 13
start at second 13
-vframes 1
undocumented command to output frames
output_%d.png
output format: output as PNG; %d = the frame number

Increase -vframes to get multiple successive frames. %d outputs 1, 2, ... 9, 10, 11, etc., so the files will not sort alphabetically without some munging.


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Fri 04 August 2006. Tags: technology