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I need to speed up video by a factor of 4x, but do not want to drop the frames and instead average them. I.e. each 4 frames are averaged, and produce 1 output frame. Target frame-rate stays the same, so video is now 4 times faster.

Is there a way to do so in ffmpeg?

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    Can you be more specific about how they should be "averaged"? What method do you want to use?
    – llogan
    Oct 5, 2015 at 6:09
  • @LordNeckbeard (f1+f2+f3+f4)/4 - simple averaging. So each resulting frame have faint traces of the movement on all sub-frames.
    – BarsMonster
    Oct 5, 2015 at 11:32
  • @BarsMonster I doubt ffmpeg can do this. Have you seen this effect done another way? Do you know what it actually looks like?
    – Jim Mack
    Oct 5, 2015 at 15:08
  • @JimMack I currently did that manually in VirtualDub, they have interpolate filter, with 0.5x interpolation it does correctly average 2 frames. Here is the result : youtube.com/watch?v=8zrws5CGWsI One can see that each frame has movement of 2 subframes, so it is slightly smoother. But doing so in a cmdline would be much faster in the future.
    – BarsMonster
    Oct 5, 2015 at 18:16
  • slowmoVideo may be worth a try, but I don't know if it has a cli. The FFmpeg framerate filter appears to perform interpolation, but it does not seem to fit your needs.
    – llogan
    Oct 5, 2015 at 21:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I use these commands:

4x speedup:

ffmpeg" -r 60 -i "inputfile.mp4"  -vf "tmix=frames=4:weights='1',select='not(mod(n\,4))',setpts=0.25*PTS" -c:v libx265 -an -x265-params crf=25 "outputfile.mp4"

16x speedup:

ffmpeg" -r 60 -i "inputfile.mp4"  -vf "tmix=frames=16:weights='1',select='not(mod(n\,16))',setpts=0.0625*PTS" -c:v libx265 -an -x265-params crf=25 "outputfile.mp4"

The "-r 60" parameter is used to specify the source file fps.
The "crf=25" parameter define the encoding quality (lower number = higher quality = higher size)

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  • Thanks, that is much more robust and universal solution!
    – BarsMonster
    Jan 2, 2022 at 10:22
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    I liked the apparent scalability of this answer, but it turns out this is ridiculously inefficient. If you do a 4× speedup for example, it's generating 4 frames (each averaging the previous 4 frames of the input) and then discarding 3 of them, for each frame of the output. I wanted to do a 60× speedup… you can do the maths. I discovered it would take more than twice as long to render (on an 8-core machine) as the runtime of the original video! Gyan's answer on the other hand, while rather inconvenient for large speedups, scales well because it doesn't do any wasted effort.
    – Andrea
    Dec 28, 2022 at 11:34
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ffmpeg with this filterchain does it:

ffmpeg -i input -vf "tblend=average,framestep=2,tblend=average,framestep=2,setpts=0.25*PTS" -r srcfps -{encoding parameters} output

srcfps should be replaced with your input's framerate.

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    Also tried for x16 using "tblend=average,framestep=2,tblend=average,framestep=2,tblend=average,framestep=2,tblend=average,framestep=2,setpts=0.0625*PTS"
    – BarsMonster
    Oct 15, 2016 at 15:31
  • so the multiplier to PTS is important to increase rate
    – genuinefafa
    Dec 12, 2020 at 15:53
  • @BarsMonster is there a way to use this to combine every frame in the video into a single image output? The docs seem to suggest (since it will use the longest input) that I can just increase the multiplier, but i'm getting silly results before I even get that far, e.g. at 256x with pts at 1/256*PTS I am getting 0.3fps and only 3 frames out of 72,000 when I would expect 281.
    – Michael
    Feb 22, 2021 at 16:18
  • @BarsMonster In fact, adjusting PTS doesn't seem to change the reported frame rate, even as high as 0.1PTS I'm still seeing 0.3fps.
    – Michael
    Feb 22, 2021 at 16:23
  • If I use setpts=1*PTS, it's still 0.3fps, but it does produce the expected number of output frames.
    – Michael
    Feb 22, 2021 at 16:35

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