Creating thumbnails from video files with Python

I could not install ffvideo on OSX Sierra so i decided to work with ffmpeg.

OSX:

brew install ffmpeg

Linux:

apt-get install ffmpeg

Python 3 Code:

import subprocess
video_input_path = '/your/video.mp4'
img_output_path = '/your/image.jpg'
subprocess.call(['ffmpeg', '-i', video_input_path, '-ss', '00:00:00.000', '-vframes', '1', img_output_path])

You can use ffvideo

from ffvideo import VideoStream
pil_image = VideoStream('0.flv').get_frame_at_sec(5).image()
pil_image.save('frame5sec.jpeg')

A simple combination of PyMedia and PIL would do the trick for AVI, ASF, or MPEG files. PyMedia lets you extract the frames (using the decoder() routine), while PIL has a simple thumbnail() routine.