Fast tool to generate thumbnail video galleries for command line

Question

I use gframecatcher to generate thumbnail video galleries, i.e. something like this:

However this is a GUI tool and I want to create recursively a gallery for every video in a directory structure, so I am looking for a fast command line tool to do this.

Answer 1

Pull out the image captures (these are 100 pixels tall, and keep aspect ratio), the rate (-r) is per-second (this yields one frame every ~5 minutes), this also adds time stamp to output image.

ffmpeg  -i MOVIE.mp4 -r 0.0033 -vf scale=-1:120 -vcodec png capture-%002d.png

Then use ImageMagick to build your gallery image:

montage -title "Movie Name\nSubtitle" -geometry +4+4 capture*.png output.png

Answer 2

The 'imagemagick' package has utilities for stuff like this.

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/thumbnails/

There are API libraries using imagemajick for a bunch of languages too.