Make Thumbnail from video

Solution 1:

ffmpeg is an excellent open source tool for manipulating videos, including extracting frames.

To extract single frame from specific timestamp you can use command like

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 1  -t 00:01:00 -f image2 image%05d.png

-r is framerate. You can also use command like

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 1/1440 -f image2 image%05d.png

to get one frame every one minute (assuming 24FPS video). The %05d means that ordinal number of each thumbnail image should be formatted using 5 digits.

If you want to combine images as montage (your grid), you can use imagemagick after extracting frames using ffmpeg.

Solution 2:

It's not a command line program, but you may also use qframecatcher.

For ubuntu/debian the requirements are: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libxine-dev build-essential

wget http://download.berlios.de/qframecatcher/qframecatcher-0.4.1.tar.gz
tar xzf qframecatcher-0.4.1.tar.gz
cd qframecatcher/src
qmake
make
./qframecatcher

Source: http://blog.radevic.com/2008/06/how-to-create-movie-or-video-frame.html

Solution 3:

vcsi is a command-line tool written in Python that can be used to create a 3 by 3 grid of snapshots with the following command:

vcsi -g 3x3 video.mkv -o output.jpg