How to Extract Images From a Video using FFmpeg

Prerequisites

FFmpeg is a free and open-source video editing tool capable of trimming, cropping, concatenating, muxing, and transcoding almost any type of media file you throw at it.

It's also a very robust solution for implementing video automation, as we use it extensively in our own video editing API. For this tutorial we'll use FFmpeg 5.1.2, but any recent version will do.

How to extract images

Use the following command to extract frames from a video. This extracts all frames using the pattern frame0001.png, frame0002.png, and so on.

Extract at a different frame rate

By default, FFmpeg extracts all frames from the video. So if your input video is 5 seconds long with a frame rate of 60 fps, it will extract 5 x 60 = 300 images. If that's too much, we can instruct FFmpeg to extract frames at a slower frame rate.

$ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 10 frame%04d.png The -r 10 argument instructs FFmpeg to extract at a frame rate of 10 fps.

Extract images every few seconds

If you only want to capture frames every few seconds, use the following:

$ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 1/3 frame%04d.png The -r 1/3 argument instructs FFmpeg to extract frames every 3 seconds. To extract every 10 seconds, use -r 1/10.

Extract at a given time

Here's how to get only the images between a given period of time:

$ ffmpeg -ss 5 -to 8 -i input.mp4 frame%04d.png The -ss 5 -to 8 arguments instruct FFmpeg to only extract frames between 5 and 8 seconds of the video. This argument should be placed before the -i input.mp4 argument, because FFmpeg distinguishes between input and output seeking. In this case, we're seeking the input video.

Creating a video screenshot

If you only want to extract a single frame from the video, do the following:

• The -ss 5 argument tells FFmpeg to jump to the 5-second mark.
• Next, it extracts a single image with the -frames 1 argument.

You'll get a screenshot at the same resolution as the input video. If you'd rather resize the image to a smaller size, i.e. make a video thumbnail, we can add an argument: $ ffmpeg -ss 5 -i input.mp4 -frames 1 -vf "scale=360:-1" screenshot.png By adding -vf "scale=360:-1", the image is resized to 360 pixels wide. By using -1, FFmpeg calculates the height automatically, keeping the image proportional.