Cut only one image from a movie with ffmpeg

Posted by Wim Koorenneef on 2007-08-12 12:21 CEST

You can use ffmpeg if you only need one image from a movie. I needed this to publish a starting picture of a small flash video on the net using the excellent flv player of Jeroen Wijering.

ffmpeg -itsoffset -5 -i movie.mpeg -vcodec png -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 360x288 movie.png

The itsoffse option tells you where to extract the image (in seconds). Of course you probably want to convert this to a jpeg image. Convert is part of the imagemagick package.

convert movie.png -quality 85 movie.jpg