So by now you are finished Archiving your DV tapes and also finished converting your DVDs to mp4 (h264) . So now you have a big hard disk full of movies and you have no idea what’s in what video.
I would never leave you in such a state so today we will be generating screen shots of the movies so you can browse the images to see what the recordings are about. I got most of the work from Screenshots of a DVD with ‘ffmpeg’ from Peter Forret’s blogg. Then a quick jump to the ffmpeg FAQ How do I encode movie to single pictures? and we were done.
The script will search for all avi files and it uses ffmpeg (our friend) to take a snapshot every 20 seconds.
for i in *.avi;do
ffmpeg -i ${i} \r
-r .05 \r
-s 360x288 \r
-an \r
-f image2 \r
-vcodec mjpeg \r
${i}_%04d.jpg;
done
-r .05 (Frames per seconds so this is every 20 secs)
-s Sets the frame size.
-an Disables the audio recording
-f image2 Forces an image format
-vcodec Force video codec to mjpeg
The files will be named the same as the parent movie but will have a number tagged on in the range 0001 -> 9999 then .jpg. The option %04d is used to do the numbering.