Use ffmpeg for JPEG to TIFF conversion

Question

I would like to use Tesseract OCR with a video.

With ffmpeg I can export some (.jpeg) images from a video. Can I convert a .jpeg into a valid .tiff or export directly .tiff images from the video with ffmpeg?

Solution

Converting to TIFF

You can convert a JPEG to TIFF:

ffmpeg -i input.jpeg -pix_fmt rgba output.tiff

Or from a video:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -pix_fmt rgba out%05d.tiff

What's important is specifying the RGBA colorspace via -pix_fmt rgba. Keeping the YUV 4:2:0 colorspace from video (-pix_fmt yuv420p) would produce TIFF files that cannot be opened in most programs (even though the YCbCr^* colorspace is allowed).

How to compress output

By default this produces uncompressed TIFF images. You can choose a different compression algorithm using the -compression_algo option:

ffmpeg -i input.jpeg -pix_fmt rgb24 -compression_algo lzw output.tiff

Valid options are packbits, raw, lzw and deflate (see ffmpeg -h encoder=tiff).

_{* YCbCr refers to what in video compression is usually known as YUV}

Comments

[Kinnectus]

I think you can export directly to tiff from ffmpeg... stackoverflow.com/questions/1717331/…

[Tenaciousd93]

Hello, thank you for your reply! No, the links in that accepted answer are broken and the other answers didn't export correcly .tiff images.

[Tenaciousd93]

Wow, amazing! That solve my problem! :) Thank you very much!

[Ray]

Using this method, I end up with TIFFs that are huge compared to outputting (say) PNG and then converting to TIFF using ImageMagick; something that 0.5MB vs 3MB. Do you know why that is? Presumably something to do with compression. How do I enable lossless compression on the TIFFs?\

[slhck]

@Ray See updated answer, there are some options for specifying compression algorithms.

[Mahesh Jamdade]

what is -pix_fmt? can you please tell what command I need to run inorder to compress the image without change the file extension?

[slhck]

@MaheshJamdade It's the color space/color format of the input. If you simply want to compress an image without changing extension, have a look at stackoverflow.com/questions/7261855/… or similar.

[Mahesh Jamdade]

@slhck thanks for the response but I am looking for a ffmpeg solution because I am using this github.com/tanersener/flutter-ffmpeg