playground/ffmpeg-thumbnail-tile.md

Generating thumbnail tiles using ffmpeg

ffmpeg can unsurprisingly build contact sheets, too. Is there anything ffmpeg can't do?

I've been organizing my movie collection lately, and I needed a way to figure out what a video is all about without having to view & seek it. Building a contact sheet is a simple solution for this. It places frames with from the video in a grid separated by an interval (like every minute) and you can quickly see what a video contains.

ffmpeg tile filter

With anything media-related, I checked to see if ffmpeg supports this: it turns out, it has a tile filter^tile, which gives us some primitives to work with.

Covering the whole video

ffmpeg -skip_frame nokey -i video.mp4 -vf 'scale=320:-1,tile=8x8' -an -vsync 0 keyframes%03d.png

This creates n files, each containing 8x8 grid of keyframes from the video. It's close, but I need a single file with tiles spanning the video from start to finish.