How can I speed up a video by dropping frames?

Question

I've got a video that's 30 minutes long. I want to make a speeded up version that's (say) 15 minutes long. I could do this by dropping every 2nd frame. How can I do this on linux?

I'm playing with gstreamer and it looks cool. Is there a way to do this with gstreamer? What would be the gst-launch command line to do it?

My source video is in Motion JPEG, so I do have the frames to drop. Even if it was using keyframes, there still should be a way to 'double speed' the film?

I'd like a command line way to do this since I want to automate it.

Answer 1

I looked around for a while recently on the best way to do this. I experimented with mencoder -speed and also libavfilter's setpts option. The best way I found was to output individual frames and then re-encode those frames into a single video. This example assumes a 30fps input video for best results and drops every other frame.

# Output the video at 15fps as jpegs
ffmpeg -i input.m4v -r 15 -f image2 /tmp/output-%06d.jpg
# Re-encode the frames at 30fps as h264
ffmpeg -r 30 -i "/tmp/output-%06d.jpg" -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 -an output.m4v