Category: Ubuntu

Added: 24th of May 2018

Viewed: 3640 times

Convert .mkv video to .png images using ffmpeg

One of my passions is playing old retro computer games, these can be found over at my other site Retro Gas

Whenever I add a new game, I always try to provide a small video and screenshots of the game for users visiting the site.

As you can imagine, getting just one game listed on the site is quite a task. When I first started adding games to my site, I needed a way to grab screenshots from the video I recorded.

After much searching and lots of trial and error, I found a software package for Linux called ffmpeg.
ffmpeg is cross platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. You can visit the main ffmpeg site here

As I use an Ubuntu based distribution, I first needed to install the package.
To install ffmpeg enter the following command in the terminal

After this I created a new folder on my desktop and dragged my .mkv video file in to it. The reason for this, is that I wanted all .png files in one folder and not scattered across the desktop. If your outputting 1 frame per second that is a lot of images.

The next step was to CD to the directory that contains the .mkv file


Then run the following command to output the .png images


The command above outputs one .png file from the .mkv file every second.
Each .png created also follows a numerical sequence because of %d in the command, example filename_1.png, filename_2.png, filename_3.png and so on......

Remember to replace filename with your own file names.