Extract particular frames from a video without loading the whole video

Question

I have a video encoded with H264, size 1.4 GB and I only need some part of the frames in the middle.

Can I use ffmpeg to extract part of the frames from the middle of the video?

Answer 1

Yes. The -ss switch to ffmpeg seeks to a given time. The -vframes flag records a specific number of frames.

$ ffmpeg -i myvideo.avi -ss 00:01:00 -vframes 20 myclip.avi

Should get 20 frames from 1 minute and onwards and put them in myclip.avi

If you want individual images set -vframes to 1 and save as a .png file for example.