Dumping all frames from a video file with VideoLAN

There are so many guides on the internet, and unfortunately, not a single one of them satiated my desire for what I wanted to do! So below is a nice one-liner to, you guessed it, dump just about every frame from a video, with VideoLAN via the PowerShell/command prompt.

.\vlc.exe "C:\Users\UserNameHere\Documents\source-file-to-dump.mp4" --video-filter=scene --scene-format=png --scene-width=-1 --scene-height=-1 --scene-prefix=frame --start-time=0 --stop-time=60 --scene-ratio=0 --gpu-affinity=0 --vout=any --rate=0.20 --scene-path="C:\Users\UserNameHere\Documents\output" vlc://quit

The TLDR:

  1. Go to where you have VideoLAN installed, for me it is C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC
  2. Ensure you have a dump/output folder created – probably best to have it in the same location that the video file is sourced at. For me, it is aptly named output in the Documents folder.
  3. Modify the command above to whatever you see fit for the output directory.

The command arguments used above explained:

  1. --video-filter=scene – Forces VLC to use the Scene module.
  2. --scene-format=png – If you want to save space, use jpeg in this place.
  3. --scene-width=-1 – -1 will output the images as equal to the source, eg 1920 wide video, 1920 wide image.
  4. --scene-height=-1 – -1 just like above, will output the image height equal to the video height.
  5. --scene-prefix=frame – Prefixes the files with a static string value, in my case, I set it to frame. The outputted file ends up as frame0001.png and so on.
  6. --start-time=0 – Forces the image dump to begin at 0.0 seconds. You can use decimals and sub-seconds here!
  7. --stop-time=60 – Forces the image dump to stop after 60 seconds. You can use decimals and sub-seconds here!
  8. --scene-ratio=0 – Forces it to dump every frame possible.
  9. --gpu-affinity=0 – Tells VLC to use the first GPU available. Adding this did swap the usage from CPU to GPU, and GPU usage only went to 6% on encode/decode on my GTX1080ti.
  10. --vout=any – A miscellaneous option really, but included for sanity.
    • Other options are: direct3d11,direct3d9,glwin32,gl,directdraw,wingdi,caca,vdummy,vmem,flaschen,yuv,none
  11. --rate=0.20 – Forces the playback dump to play at 0.20x of the 1x (normal) speed). Any faster will result in lost frames from being dropped! (Big note there)
  12. --scene-path="" – Ensure where you’re going to dump out the image stills actually exists.
    • For me, the option set as above is: C:\Users\UserNameHere\Documents\output where UserNameHere if your account name on your machine and output is the folder where images are dumped to.

So there you have it, VideoLAN used to dump all frames (well, nearly all frames) into their own images.

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