[MPlayer-users] Create tile faster than real-time?

[Corey Hickey]

Jon Drukman wrote:
> I'm trying to create 4x4 "contact sheets" of thumbnails for movie files. 
>   I've got it to work using this command line:
> 
> ~/mplayer -quiet -ao null -vo jpeg:outdir=test -vf 
> scale=180:135,framestep=341,tile=4:4:16 file.avi
> 
> I run identify to find the FPS and LENGTH, by which I derive the total 
> number of frames, then I use framestep so that I get 16 evenly-spaced 
> frames from the movie.  Unfortunately to run this, it takes the duration 
> of the movie.  It seems like it's playing "in real time" even though 
> there's no video output.  To transcode the video to another format takes 
> much less than the actual duration of the movie so I am pretty sure the 
> machine could go faster (it's beefy - dual opteron with plenty of RAM).

Yep. That's because it's still playing at normal speed.

> Any way to get it to go faster?

To play as quickly as possible, add -benchmark.
Also, you don't need to decode the audio; change '-ao null' to -nosound 
and you'll get a slight speed boost.

-Corey