Program for taking snap-shots of movie

animationimagesvideo

Are there any programs that would let me specify parts of a video-file (avi, mpeg, mp4, …) and take "snap-shots" every so-and-so second/minute, and store it as a series of image-files (eg. jpeg)? For example select part of a movie between 0h45m and 1h00m, and take a "snap-shot" every 30 second.

It may be part of or a plug-in for a video-player (eg. VLC)… the point is that I need something that takes snap-shots automatically, not maually.

Further more, are there any good programs for turning such a series of image-files into an animated-GIF or-PNG file? (It would of course be a bonus if the snap-shot program could optionally save the snaps as animated GIF/PNG.)

Best Answer

You can use ffmpeg to do this. There are several examples over on the ffmpeg website.

Here are a few of them:

This will create one thumbnail image every minute, named img001.jpg, img002.jpg, img003.jpg, ... (%03d means that ordinal number of each thumbnail image should be formatted using 3 digits)
```
$ ffmpeg -i myvideo.avi -f image2 -vf fps=fps=1/60 img%03d.jpg
```
This will create one thumbnail image every 10 minutes, named thumb0001.bmp, thumb0002.bmp, thumb0003.bmp, ...
```
$ ffmpeg -i test.flv -f image2 -vf fps=fps=1/600 thumb%04d.bmp
```

If you want to make them into a short video you can again enlist the help of ffmpeg. It's discussed on this page of their website.

Here are a few more examples:

Here, each image will have a duration of 5 seconds (the inverse of 1/5 frames per second). By telling FFmpeg to set the input file's FPS option (frames per second) to some very low value, we made FFmpeg duplicate frames at the output and thus we achieved to display each image for some time on screen:
```
$ ffmpeg -f image2 -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 out.mp4
```
If you don't have images numbered and ordered in series (img001.jpg, img002.jpg, img003.jpg) but rather random bunch of images, ffmpeg also supports bash-style globbing (* represents any number of any characters):
```
$ ffmpeg -f image2 -r 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' -c:v libx264 out.mp4
```

or for png images:

    $ ffmpeg -f image2 -r 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -c:v libx264 out.mp4

To make the resulting video into an animated gif you could use the steps outlined int his SO Q&A titled: How to generate gif from avi using ffmpeg?:

$ ffmpeg -i video.avi -t 10 out%02d.gif

then:

$ gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Here's the link to the tool gifsicle.

Software

Install and configure screencasting software to produce high-quality desktop videos as follows:

Uninstall libav to remove its ffmpeg version from the system:

sudo apt-get --purge remove libav-tools
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Install FFmpeg from the following PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jon-severinsson/ffmpeg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Install SimpleScreenRecorder:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maarten-baert/simplescreenrecorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install simplescreenrecorder

Do not install ffmpeg from the static build as it does not include x11grab.

Record using SimpleScreenRecorder

Run SimpleScreenRecorder.
Click Yes, if prompted.
Click Continue.
Select Record a fixed rectangle.
Click Select window.
Click on a window to record its contents.
Optionally, uncheck Record audio.
Click Continue.
Set Container to mp4.
Set Codec to Other.
Set Codec name to libx264.
Set Bit rate to 8192.
Set Save as to recording.mp4.
Uncheck Allow frame skipping.
Click Continue.
When ready, click Start recording.
When finished recording click Pause.
Click Save recording.

Record using FFmpeg

For a higher-quality recording, use ffmpeg directly. Save the following script to /usr/local/bin/capture.sh and make the script executable (e.g., sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/capture.sh):

#/bin/bash
INFO=$(xwininfo -frame)
WIN_GEO=$(echo $INFO | grep -oEe 'geometry [0-9]+x[0-9]+' | grep -oEe '[0-9]+x[0-9]+')
WIN_XY=$(echo $INFO | grep -oEe 'Corners:\s+\+[0-9]+\+[0-9]+' | grep -oEe '[0-9]+\+[0-9]+' | sed -e 's/\+/,/' )

ffmpeg -f x11grab -y -r 30 -s $WIN_GEO -i :0.0+$WIN_XY -vcodec ffv1 -sameq output.avi

Use the above script as follows:

Open a terminal.
Change to a directory that has ample drive space.
Ensure write permissions in the current working directory.
Run: capture.sh
Click on a target window.
Press control+c in the terminal to stop recording.

The captured video will be saved as output.avi.

Playback

Depending on the video player, playback might appear to be washed out. Here are my findings:

mplayer - Washed out
vlc - Nearly perfect

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Washed out colours with screencast software but not screenshot on Ubuntu (all versions)

Software

Record using SimpleScreenRecorder

Record using FFmpeg

Playback

See Also

SSH – How to Play Remote Movie on Remote Computer

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