mplayer frame skipping option
 

im looking for command line option for mplayer that would specify how many frames to skip per second (or something like that).

i have an application that is using mplayer as a backend processor, and this skipping functionality is needed because i would like to generate a snapshot every second of the movie (for a filmstrip component).

i have been looking around and dont really see anything that will do what i need, but mplayer has so many options i would almost bet there is a way.

any ideas?

I know that ffmpeg can do this easily:

The '-r' option specify the rate, in frames per second. In the above command the rate is '.1', so one frame grab is generated for each 10 seconds of video.

ok i tried that and it works just as i need it to, though i am surprised that mplayer does not have that available too. i would have figured that if ffmpeg had something mplayer would make it available as well. i guess i would have figured wrong.

thanks for your time.

i came across an option that does not seem to be well documented for mplayer (or rather, i just didnt find it until now..)

-sstep

it specifies how many seconds to skip between reads. it seems to work well so far.

i had been using the other solution with ffmpeg with no problems. however i am making heavy use of EDL files, which are unsupported by ffmpeg, and it was causing extra work to work around that limitation.

-x

PS. it looks like this may not be as exact due to mplayer only being able to seek to the next keyframe. i am coming out with image counts that do not match the video length. hmm ...