Converting hundreds of pictures of naming style “frame_0000.jpg”, “frame_0001.jpg” into an avi?

Question

I have all of these images as jpegs and I want to stream them into an AVI. I am trying to use ffmpeg with the command noted here but I get an error "No such file or directory".

My exact command is (from the folder containing all of these files):

ffmpeg -f image2 -i frame_%d.jpg view.avi

How do I do this? Also, how can I do this for a specific range of images? Say I only want frames 500 to 1000, so I want frame_0500.jpg to frame_1000.jpg?

Answer 1

The correct command should be

ffmpeg -f image2 -i frame_%04d.jpg view.avi

The %04d means the number is 4 characters in length, zero padded (0000-9999).

If you want to do a range, I would just move the files you want into their own directory.

This is easy with a gui, but with command line you could do

mv frame_0[5-9]* newfolder
mv frame_1000* newfolder

Answer 2

In addition to Paul's suggestion you can often use cat to pipe your images to ffmpeg:

cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -c:v mjpeg -i - output

Note that you may have to change c:v to vcodec depending on how old your ffmpeg is. This is useful if your images are sequentially ordered but not in a method that ffmpeg accepts (such as images not starting with 1).