Make Thumbnail from video

Question

How can I make a simple capture from a video. Preferably from the command line?

Idea: take 9 snapshots for 9 even placed (on the timeline) times, and save them as JPGs

Example:

Movie length = 10 min
T1= snapshot of 1 min
T2= snapshot of 2 min
......
T9= snapshot of 9 min
   |   |
 T1| T2| T3
---+---+---
 T4| T5| T6
---+---+---
 T7| T8| T9
   |   |

What's the best program to do this? Are there any opensource programs?

Answer 1

ffmpeg is an excellent open source tool for manipulating videos, including extracting frames.

To extract single frame from specific timestamp you can use command like

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 1  -t 00:01:00 -f image image%05d.png

-r is framerate. You can also use command like

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 1/1440 -f image image%05d.png

to get one frame every one minute (assuming 24FPS video).

If you want to combine images as montage (your grid), you can use imagemagick after extracting frames using ffmpeg.