convert H264 video to raw YUV format

Question

Is it possible to create a raw YUV video from H264 encoded video using ffmpeg? I want to open the video with matlab and access Luma, Cb and Cr components frame by frame.

Solution

Yes you can, you just have to specific the pixel format. To get the whole list of the format:

ffmpeg -pix_fmts | grep -i pixel_format_name

For example if you want to save the 1st video track of an mp4 file as a yuv420p (p means planar) file:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p out.yuv

Comments

[Necip Onur Uzun]

First I got this error: Unrecognized option 'c:v' Then, I used "-vcodec rawvideo" instead of "-c:v rawvideo" and it's worked. Thanks!

[alexbuisson]

-c:v and -c:a should be ok with recent version of ffmpeg, you may run an old one, consider to update your version if you can :)

[Joshua F. Rountree]

Anyone else get a bunch of multi-colored lines? Also the conversion happens instantly which doesn't seem right to me...?

[tomtheengineer]

@JoshuaF.Rountree You need to specify the dimensions in order to be able to view it (e.g., in VLC): stackoverflow.com/a/22313305/2442139

[Abdullah Farweez]

working command : ffmpeg -i input.264 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p output.yuv

[thang]

is there a way to store timestamps?

[alexbuisson]

@thang if you have keep timestamp + raw video frame, you can follow 2 different way. 1st, combine ffmpeg to decode the raw frame and ffprobe --show_frame (or something like that..) to dump frames information and grep their pts. After that interleave those 2 information source (I think I used a simple python script to read 2 procress stdout and mux them on the output) not that I also often parse an ffmpeg -i filename output to get resolution and frame-rate to build a fully independant and compact format for raw video data like that: W,H,FPS, PTS, FRAME, .... PTS, FRAME ...