FFMPEG for animation of image files outputs all-black video

Solution 1:

The videos generated with your files and the following commands both play fine for me in ffplay. The one with yuv420p chosen as the pixel format also plays fine in QuickTime.

ffmpeg -r 1 -i f_%02d.png out.mp4
ffmpeg -r 1 -i f_%02d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Only VLC has troubles displaying the video (download). It'll show me a second of grey and then black, but not for a duration of 8 seconds.*

To produce stable video, you can try to increase the output frame rate, since it's the 1 fps that most players will choke on. The output file will be bigger than needed, of course.

ffmpeg -r 1 -i f_%02d.png -r 25 out.mp4
ffmpeg -r 1 -i f_%02d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 25 out.mp4         <= for older players

Here we've told to read the images at 1 frame per second, but output them (duplicating frames) at 25.

_{* I consider this a bug with VLC. Since it's based on libavcodec and libavformat (from the FFmpeg project), and ffplay handles the file just fine, VLC should have no major issues with it. I would suggest you create a bug report in VLC – chances are the file isn't parsed correctly.}