Split video into images with ffmpeg-python

Question:

As far as I understand ffmpeg-python is main package in Python to operate ffmpeg directly.

Now I want to take a video and save it’s frames as separate files at some fps.

There are plenty of command line ways to do it, e.g. ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf fps=1 img/output%06d.png described here

But I want to do it in Python. Also there are solutions [1] [2] that use Python’s subprocess to call ffmpeg CLI, but it looks dirty for me.

Is there any way to to make it using ffmpeg-python?

Asked By: sgt pepper

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Answers:

I’d suggest you try imageio module and use the following code as a starting point:

import imageio

reader = imageio.get_reader('imageio:cockatoo.mp4')

for frame_number, im in enumerate(reader):
    # im is numpy array
    if frame_number % 10 == 0:
        imageio.imwrite(f'frame_{frame_number}.jpg', im)
Answered By: Senyai

You can also use openCV for that.

Reference code:

import cv2

video_capture = cv2.VideoCapture("your_video_path")
video_capture.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS, <your_desired_fps_here>)

saved_frame_name = 0

while video_capture.isOpened():
    frame_is_read, frame = video_capture.read()

    if frame_is_read:
        cv2.imwrite(f"frame{str(saved_frame_name)}.jpg", frame)
        saved_frame_name += 1

    else:
        print("Could not read the frame.")
Answered By: AreUMinee

The following works for me:

ffmpeg
.input(url)
.filter('fps', fps='1/60')
.output('thumbs/test-%d.jpg', 
        start_number=0)
.overwrite_output()
.run(quiet=True)
Answered By: norus

@norus solution is actually good, but for me it was missing the ss and r parameters in the input. I used a local file instead of a url.

This is my solution:

  ffmpeg.input(<path/to/file>, ss = 0, r = 1)
        .filter('fps', fps='1/60')
        .output('thumbs/test-%d.jpg', start_number=0)
        .overwrite_output()]
        .run(quiet=True)

ss is the starting second in the above code starts on 0
r is the ration, because the filter fps is set to 1/60 an r of 1 will return 1 frame per second, of 2 1 frame every 2 seconds, 0.5 a frame every half second….

Answered By: Jorge
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