Video guys help me out please.......question
 

I have a load of vids on linux server.....I need to 1 or a few thumbs for each scene......so easiest way that comes to mind.......export first 10 frames from each file to make sure there's at least 1 that's usable as a thumb which I can
use in the index page that lists all scenes with description and a thumb from the scene......

before I reinvent the wheel.....is there a good tool that can already do this.....
preferably for linux so I can do it on the server instead of on workstation and then upload the results?

I'm sure ffmpeg can do it.....but perhaps something simple can do it too as that's all I ever need to do by on server with the file.......so to install ffmpeg for just doing that I rather avoid if possible......I know ffmpeg rocks and what not
but I won't ever need it for anything else than this........

If there's no easy linux tool you know off......then winblows is fine too as long as it can do it as a batchjob that doesn't require me to do them 1 by 1....

Thanks a million! :thumbsup

I have an bash/ffmpeg script I wrote to extract thumbnails every X seconds off of video. I never got it to work on wmv files but I'll bet with some trying you can make it work if you absolutely need it (right now it just extracts from MPEG-4 files). Other than that, frame-shots.com has a cool tool for grabbing screenshots from video files, that's what I use for my WMV files. Hit me up on ICQ if you want that bash script! :thumbsup

thanks this works......still looking for other options.....anyone?

well, I don't know the first thing about linux, and I'm only 10% sure I understand what you mean about doing it on a server. BUT, I know Vegas Video has batch thumb tools. You can set it to dump thumbs at any interval between grabs, but it has to do the whole video, not just a few thumbs. So you would set it to grab like once every minute if you want fewer thumbs to deal with.

If you have a lot of videos, you can load them up in the timeline then just space them out by like 10 minutes. Then you can run them all out as one big image dump, then when sorting you just find the blank thumbs and know that is where the next scene starts.

However, I hear there is a way to create a script that will do all that for you, but I don't know how to script so I'm left doing it the 'stupid' way.

Thanks....I've figured out howto do it with a script.....will post it here later
in case anyone can use it. It scans folders for video files (name scheme)
and extract x thumbs from the files that match the criteria.

It can start from start of vid or at any time you specify. Same for end time
interval of extracting thumbs, dimensions, number of thumbs to extract.

:thumbsup

I you have FFMpeg:

ffmpeg -i <your.file> -t 10 -qscale 1 -r 1 -s (thumb)x(size) -f image2 -vcodec mjpeg thumb&#37;d.jpg

Cheers

ChrisL