[FFmpeg-user] improving selection of image frames from videos

[David Bernat]

Hello: nuisance email. Would anyones be open to deep diving into these
questions. I will summarize our answers in a public post for search engines
to find. :)

On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 12:54 PM David Bernat <david.bernat at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Lots of good times over here extracting frames from videos. Hello to
> YouTube. Hello all you wonderful (and other) people who subscribe to this
> email list to know what I am doing. (To everybody else: whoa boy do we have
> a news story for you to read in the future! Hello!)
>
> Could you help me refine this process?
>
> The fastest process that I have determined so far is this. It allows me to
> generate frames every N seconds apart, to encode the specific timestamp of
> the specific frame (exactly) into the filename of the bmp, and does not
> require encoding. We are going for maximum speed so we want better than
> even seek, and using skip_frame helps accelerate that extraction of
> individual frames as well. The use of bmp is because these are the fastest
> to write files; as transformation to png or jpg can be done offline.
> ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -skip_frame nokey -i FILENAME -vf fps=1/5 -vsync 0
> -frame_pts true -r 1000 out%d.bmp
>
> There are several improvements that I cannot confirm nor figure out:
> 1. Can we confirm that the timestamp of the bmp file is precisely the
> timestamp of the frame? Using the command without "-vf fps=1/5" will select
> exactly key frames, but those are every ~one second, and I need to be able
> to customize this. It is not clear to me how I can pull frames at arbitrary
> timestamps without doing some slower recalculation of the frames; or, what
> the algorithm is doing is selecting nearest keyframes but tagging them with
> filenames with filenames like out1000.bmp which is not the precise
> timestamp. What can be improved?
>
> 2. This ERROR: "Using -vsync passthrough and -r/-fpsmax can produce
> invalid output files" is supposed to be fixed by using -fps_mode instead of
> -vsync. But unfortunately the documentation is meager, and I have not been
> able to find an exact solution online. What is -fps_mode, how is it used,
> and what should I be including here?
>
> 3. This WARNING: "[hevc @ 0x13d92c210] Multiple Dolby Vision RPUs found in
> one AU. Skipping previous." is a warning that presumably slows down
> calculation, and can be removed by properly pre-processing the file
> beforehand or by properly configuring the ffmpeg command. What can I do?
> The warning also throws off subprocess calls by mistaking this as an error,
> but adjusting loglevel will not work as I need its full output anyway.
>
> Thank you so much, everybody. I have been really enjoying this community a
> lot!
>
> 4. Any other improvements? I plan to "ffmpeg segment" longer files into 5
> minute chunks, then parallel process the selection of image files from
> those at approximately 10 second intervals.
>
> Thank you!!!!!
>
> Signed.
> David
>
>
>
>
> David Bernat, Ph. D.
> text: 917-825-7193 / LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bernat/>
> All content should be considered proprietary to Starlight LLC and
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>
>