Can ImageMagick make thumbnails from video?

Question

I'm trying to extract thumbnails from video via ImageMagick. I found some samples from their official site, but it makes GIF, not PNG. I want a solid thumbnail though.

Can it create the same output as with this ffmpeg command?

ffmpeg -ss 600 -i myVideo.mp4 -vframes 1 -s 420x270 Out.bmp

Solution 1

You can extract thumbnails from videos with ImageMagick like so (from here - another answer claims that ImageMagick uses ffmpeg 'under the hood', so I don't know if this will actually be any faster than just using ffmpeg):

convert input.mp4[100] thumbnail.png

the [100] tells ImageMagick to take the 100th frame from input.mp4. I've tested it on a H.264 video stream in an MP4 container. Obviously you can use whatever ImageMagick options you want, including deinterlacing as described in your link.

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ImageMagick is really for dealing with individual images, though; for video, you should just use ffmpeg. Obviously there is some overlap here, since you're dealing with an individual frame, but I'd say that deinterlacing is more of a video-processing task.

You should use the yadif filter for deinterlacing. You can add it to your existing line thusly:

ffmpeg -ss 600 -i input.mp4 -vframes 1 -s 420x270 -filter:v 'yadif' output.png

when working with filters, I prefer to use the scale filter rather than -s:

ffmpeg -ss 600 -i input.mp4 -vframes 1 -filter:v 'yadif,scale=420:270' output.png

Solution 2

ImageMagick shells out to ffmpeg with this command:

ffmpeg -v -1 -vframes %S -i "%i" -vcodec pam -an -f rawvideo -y "%u.pam" 2> "%Z"

So the short answer is "no" (since it does not do it itself).

Comments

[evilsoup]

@slhck I interpreted the OP's actual problem as 'getting nice-looking thumbnails from interlaced video', and assumed that they were just trying to use the wrong tool for the job (i.e. get the thumbnail with ffmpeg -> deinterlace with ImageMagick). If anyone were to post a way of doing it with ImageMagick, though, they'd have my upvote.

[evilsoup]

@JuneyoungOh taking thumbnails with ImageMagick is indeed possible, see the update to my answer. I doubt it'll be any faster, though, since it seems (from my superficial googling) that ImageMagick uses ffmpeg as a back-end for dealing with videos.

[Juneyoung Oh]

@evilsoup Oh Thanks.I thought it is impossible. Now I can check which is faster:D many thanks.