Fastest way to extract a specific frame from a video (PHP/ffmpeg/anything)

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Of course you could code up some C/C++ and link to -lav*, basically creating a simplified version of ffmpeg just for extracting frames, and maybe even do it as a php extension (also I wouldn’t run it as the same user, let alone in the same process). But the result is very unlikely to be faster, because you would only avoid some forking and setup overhead, but your likely problem is actually the decoding, which would still be the same.

Instead, you should first look into using ffmpeg in fast seeking mode (or fast/accurate hybrid mode). Their wiki states about fast seeking:

The -ss parameter needs to be specified before -i:

ffmpeg -ss 00:03:00 -i Underworld.Awakening.avi -frames:v 1 out1.jpg

This example will produce one image frame (out1.jpg) somewhere around
the third minute from the beginning of the movie. The input will be
parsed using keyframes, which is very fast. The drawback is that it
will also finish the seeking at some keyframe, not necessarily located
at specified time (00:03:00), so the seeking will not be as accurate
as expected.

Fast seeking is less accurate, but a damn lot faster, as ffmpeg will not actually need to decode (most of) the movie during the seek, while fast/accurate hybrid mode is good compromise. Read the wiki page for all available options.

Edit 14/06/10:

As of FFmpeg 2.1, when transcoding with ffmpeg (i.e. not stream copying), -ss is now accurate even when used as an input option. Previous behavior can be restored with the -noaccurate_seek option.
(source)

So with 2.1+, “hybrid” seeking shouldn’t be required anymore for accurate results when it comes to re-encodes (and saving to .jpeg is a re-encode). It is enough to do the usual fast seeking (-ss ... -i ...) instead of slow seeking (-i ... -ss ...).

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