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I have a video file split into many small files with the split command (then I can merge them with cat).

split --bytes=100M video.mp4 new

Now I want to take a snapshot of the beginning of each part. Can ffmpeg do that or I need to merge the video again? My main concern is except the first file, no file have the valid video header.

I'm using Ubuntu.

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No, ffmpeg can't do that, as the second to nth video file will start at completely random positions within the bytestream. You have to concatenate the video.

Theoretically, if your videos were just raw H.264 bitstreams, then it might be possible to seek to the first frame and then decode it, but any regular command line tool like ffmpeg will fail to read the file, as it just appears like random data. If you're a programmer with experience in decoding media, then you could probably do it for very specific combinations of codecs and containers, but that'd require quite a bit of effort.

I would suggest you split the video using a segmenter that can generate fragmented MP4, and not on raw bytes.

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