If the JPEG encoding step is too performance intensive, you could always store the frames uncompressed as BMP images:

ffmpeg -i file.mpg -r 1/1 $filename%03d.bmp

This also has the advantage of not incurring more quality loss through quantization by transcoding to JPEG. (PNG is also lossless but tends to take much longer than JPEG to encode.)

If you want 1/10 of what you have now (when you use -r 1) then use

 -r 0.1

It will get 1 frame every 10 seconds instead of 1 frame every 1 second.

 ffmpeg -i out1.avi -r 0.1 -f image2 image-%3d.jpeg

EDIT:

If you really what every 10th frame from video then you can use select with modulo 10

ffmpeg -i out1.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n\,10))" -vsync vfr image_%03d.jpg

but it may gives more images than before.

If video has 25fps then -r 1 gives image every 25th frame. And if video has 60fps then gives image every 60th frame. So it gives less images then this code which get image every 10th frame.

Using -r 0.1 sets the output framerate to 0.1Hz, but it's not guaranteed to get frame from the input video exactly every 10 seconds (I am not sure why).

One way for solving it is using select filter.

Example (without GPU acceleration):

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "select=bitor(gte(t-prev_selected_t\,10)\,isnan(prev_selected_t))" -vsync 0 f%09d.jpg

• bitor(gte(t-prev_selected_t\,10) is 1 when difference between "passed" timestamps is grater of equal 10 seconds.
  When expression is evaluated to 1, the frame is "selected" and passed to the output.
• bitor with isnan(prev_selected_t) passes the first frame, where prev_selected_t is NaN (has no value).
• -vsync 0 applies "passthrough" - Each frame is passed with its timestamp from the demuxer to the muxer.

Here is an example with scale_cuda and thumbnail_cuda:

ffmpeg \
    -loglevel error \
    -hwaccel cuvid \
    -hwaccel_output_format cuda \
    -c:v h264_cuvid \
    -i "$video_file" \
    -filter:v "scale_cuda=w=-1:h=100,thumbnail_cuda=2,hwdownload,format=nv12,select=bitor(gte(t-prev_selected_t\,10)\,isnan(prev_selected_t))" \
    -vsync 0 \
    -color_range 2 \
    f%09d.jpg   

• Due to the usage of thumbnail_cuda filter, we have to place the select filter at the end.

Testing:
Build synthetic video with frame counter at 10fps:

ffmpeg -y -f lavfi -r 10 -i testsrc=size=128x72:rate=1:duration=1000 -vf setpts=N/10/TB -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p input.mp4

Output frames after executing the above command:

As you can see, the selected frames are exactly every 10 seconds.

Select 1 frame out of every 10 frames

You can use the select video filter in ffmpeg to do this:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "select=not(mod(n\,10))" -vsync vfr -q:v 2 img_%03d.jpg

• For JPG output you can vary quality with -q:v. Effective range is 2 (best quality) to 31 (worst quality). You don't need this option if you want to output to PNG instead.

• This will output img_001.jpg, img_002.jpg, img_003.jpg, etc.

I was trying to find the answer to this question too. I made use of radri's answer but found that it has a mistake.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 0.5 -f image2 output_%05d.jpg

produces a frame every 2 seconds because -r means frame rate. In this case, 0.5 frames a second, or 1 frame every 2 seconds.

With the same logic, if your video is 1007 seconds long and you need only 20 frames, you need a frame every 50.53 seconds. Translated to frame rate, would be 0.01979 frames a second.

So your code should be

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 0.01979 -f image2 output_%05d.jpg

I hope that helps someone, like it helped me.

It's very simple with ffmpeg, and it can output one frame every N seconds without extra scripting. To export as an image sequence just use myimage_%04d.png or similar as the output. The %0xd bit is converted to a zero-padded integer x digits long - the example I gave gets output as

• myimage_0000.png,

• myimage_0001.png,

• myimage_0002.png

  etc..

You can use lots of still image formats, png, jpeg, tga, whatever (see ffmpeg -formats for a full list).

Ok so now we know how to export the movie as a sequence of images, but say we don't want to export every single frame?

The trick is to simply change the frame rate of the output to whatever we want using the -r n option where n is the number of frames per second. 1 frame per second would be -r 1, one frame every four seconds would be -r 0.25, one frame every ten seconds would be -r 0.1 and so on.

So to put it all together, this is how it would look to save one frame of input.mov every four seconds to output_0000.png, output_0001.png etc.:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -r 0.25 output_%04d.png

Note that the -r 0.25 option goes after the -i input.mov part, because it's controlling the frame rate of the output. If you put it before the input it would treat the input file as if it had the specified frame rate.

Change the %xd to however many digits you need, e.g. if the command would create more than 10,000 frames change the %04d to %05d. This also works for input files that are image sequence. Read more here.

Windows users: On the command line use %

example: ffmpeg -i inputFile.mp4 -r 1 outputFile_%02d.png

In CMD and BAT Scripts use %%

example: ffmpeg -i inputFile.mp4 -r 1 outputFile %%02d.png

So double %% in scripts, and single % on the interactive command line. Getting it wrong in either situation will generate an error.

Edit Worth checking out the discussion of file types in the comments below. There are advantages and disadvantages with each:

• jpeg much smaller file sizes, lossy, only 8-bit colour, no alpha.
• png lossless, large files, slow. 8-bit colour supports alpha.
• tiff lossless, even larger files, fast, supports up to 16 colour and alpha.

To specify the file format, just use the required extension in the output file, e.g. myimage_%04d.jpg, myimage_%04d.png or myimage_%04d.tiff