How to extract 1 screenshot for a video with ffmpeg at a given time

Question

There are many tutorials and stuff showing how to extract multiple screenshots from a video using ffmpeg. You set -r and you can even start a certain amount in.

But I just want 1 screenshot at, say 01:23:45 in. Or 1 screenshot at 86% in.

This is all possible with ffmpegthumbnailer but it's another dependency I don't want to depend on. I want to be able to do it with ffmpeg.

User · Accepted Answer

Use the -ss option   ffmpeg -ss 01 23 45 -i input -vframes 1 -q v 2 output jpg    For JPEG output use -q v to control output quality  Full range is a linear scale of 1-31 where a lower value results in a higher quality  2-5 is a good range to try  The select filter provides an alternative method for more complex needs such as selecting only certain frame types  or 1 per 100  etc  Placing -ss before the input will be faster  See FFmpeg Wiki  Seeking and this excerpt from the ffmpeg cli tool documentation       -ss position  input output       When used as an input option  before -i   seeks in this input file to position  Note the in most formats it is not possible to seek   exactly  so ffmpeg will seek to the closest seek point before   position  When transcoding and -accurate seek is enabled  the   default   this extra segment between the seek point and position will   be decoded and discarded  When doing stream copy or when   -noaccurate seek is used  it will be preserved       When used as an output option  before an output filename   decodes but discards input until the timestamps reach position       position may be either in seconds or in hh mm ss  xxx  form

User · Answer

FFMpeg can do this by seeking to the given timestamp and extracting exactly one frame as an image, see for instance:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -ss 01:23:45 -vframes 1 output.jpg

Let's explain the options:

-i input file           the path to the input file
-ss 01:23:45            seek the position to the specified timestamp
-vframes 1              only handle one video frame
output.jpg              output filename, should have a well-known extension

The -ss parameter accepts a value in the form HH:MM:SS[.xxx] or as a number in seconds. If you need a percentage, you need to compute the video duration beforehand.

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