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I'm trying to generate a GIF thumbnail out of a video, similar to what youtube thumbnail works when we hover the mouse on a thumbnail as a video preview.

Is there any ways to do it with FFmpeg? Say I want to generate a 2-3 second GIF out of a video. How can I do that? Based on what I see from youtube, apparently it takes one frame out of multiple consecutive frames, not all of them.

I'm not really concerned if that GIF is a good representative of the video as that is more semantic problem to investigate.

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  • .You want to pick every Nth frame and compose a GIF?
    – Gyan
    May 28, 2019 at 20:04
  • @Gyan That. Plus another approach can be pick multiple consecutive I-frames (or every Nth I-frame) and compose a GIF.
    – Tina J
    May 28, 2019 at 21:12

1 Answer 1

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There is thumbnail filter just for that, and palettegen/paletteuse to create high quality gif.

Example command: "scale=vga,thumbnail=100,split[a][b],[b]palettegen=reserve_transparent=0:stats_mode=single[b];[a][b]paletteuse=new=1,settb=1/25,setpts=N"

Thumbnail filter selects one frame from set of 100 frames. To get gif of 3 secs, you will need to adjust this number to smaller or bigger value depending on source file number of frames.

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  • I get your point. But the GIF it generates is awkward! Here is the gif: dropbox.com/s/0igto0uothaz13c/output3.gif from this video: dropbox.com/s/j6yqn83399kzxy3/debate.mp4
    – Tina J
    May 28, 2019 at 21:11
  • The above command was just example. I can not guess what you really want/need. How much time each frame should last, etc, etc..
    – user12174
    May 28, 2019 at 21:27
  • I see. Thanks. Maybe say consecutive I-frames worth of 3 seconds?
    – Tina J
    May 28, 2019 at 21:35
  • I doubt selecting I-frames is worthy goal. For selecting 3 seconds of frames, I will need duration in milliseconds of each displayed gif frame and number of frames in source video.
    – user12174
    May 29, 2019 at 8:01
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    For selecting I-frames only you use select filter before thumbnail filter. And use number of I-frames instead of all video frames when calculating number for n thumbnail option. This needs some shell scripting too. Off course you can use duration of video and video frame-rate to derive number of video frames but this may not be always correct.
    – user12174
    May 30, 2019 at 8:47

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