How to generate video screencaps of video files via linux commandline

Question

Is there a command line program for linux (ubuntu) which can generate a large image containing say 6 caps from a given video (e.g. WMV) laid out storyboard style (I know on Windows media player classic can do this)? I need this for part of a script I am writing.

Answer 1

I pulled the answer from this site: http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/29/creating-video-thumbnails-using-ffmpeg/

ffmpeg -itsoffset -4 -i test.avi -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.jpg

Where -4 is the number of seconds into the file to grab the screenshot, 320x240 is the screenshot size, and test.jpg is the output file.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Use SlickSlice

./slickslice.sh -x video.avi -s 5x3 -e

Answer 3

I've used MPlayer to save frames as images and ImageMagick to combine them:

mplayer -nosound -sstep 15 -vo png video.mkv
montage *.png -tile 3x3 -geometry 300x+0+0 screencaps.png