Extracting Video Frame at Specific Time Using FFmpeg

This post is LONG overdue. I’ve been playing FFmpeg for a long time now and through trial and error, along with this page, figured out how to extract a JPG frame from a video at a specific time. A reader recently posted a question asking how to get this done and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting a frame grab here:

This came from a Windows Media file and was grabbed using the following command:

ffmpeg -i n.wmv -ss 00:00:20 -t 00:00:1 -s 320×240 -r 1 -f singlejpeg myframe.jpg

If you haven’t seen FFmpeg’s overwhelming parameter list then beware. This might look like a complicated command, but given FFmpeg has over 100 parameters this really isn’t much. Here’s what the parameters mean:

-i input file name
-ss set the start time offset
-t set the recording time
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation)
-r set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)
-f force format

The last paramter is actually the output file name. I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally get this working. If you have any problems with the command above then please be sure to contact me.

4 Responses to “Extracting Video Frame at Specific Time Using FFmpeg”

1. Emilio says:

   January 26, 2007 at 6:50 am

   This command doesn’t work neither linux debian nor windows server 2003.
   But if you change the -f force format to this->

   ffmpeg -i %1 -ss 00:00:20 -t 00:00:01 -s 320×240 -r 1 -f mjpeg %2.jpg

   it will be work.
   You article was very useful for me.
   Best regards Emilio
2. Mit says:

   February 27, 2007 at 1:27 pm

   If you’re a PHP fan, there’s always ffmpeg-php which does it all for you
   http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/
3. Robin says:

   July 25, 2007 at 1:10 am

   Hi, I got here through this post http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2006-July/003526.html

   I just wanted to add how I was able to get a few frames (it’s hard to get the right one on the first try) with this:

   ffmpeg -ss 0:1:36 -t 1 -i movie.avi -f image2 image-%d.png

   It uses the movie size and grabs 1 second (-t 1) worth of png images into image-1.png, image-2.png, etc. Depending on the encoding, you might get 24 or 30 images or something else.
4. Matt Coneybeare says:

   November 24, 2007 at 8:44 pm

   I got it working in a perl script that produces one png shot at any time:

   ffmpeg -ss 0:10:00 -t 1 -s 400×300 -i input.avi -f mjpeg output.png

   I am running ubuntu.