Question

Hey, I want to split a video which is one second long (25fps)into 25 seperate video files. I know I can split it up into jpegs but I need to retain the audio. So when I recompile audio is still there.

This is what I tried to grab the first frame only (with audio):

ffmpeg -i 1.mov -vcodec mjpeg -qscale 1 -an -ss 00:00:00:00 -t 00:00:00:1 frame1.mov

But it doesn’t seem to work. Am I wrong in assuming ffmpeg supports time stamps in this format? hh:mm:ss:f?

Thanks

Answer 1

You are wrong in assuming ffmpeg supports timestamps in that format, but that’s not the only problem

• ffmpeg does not support the time format you’re using. Options are either the time in seconds, or hh:mm:ss[.xxx] (two colons and a dot instead of three colons).
• Your example code specifically strips the audio. That’s what -an does.
• Splitting by time when you actually want frames is not a great idea. Though since the audio frames are unlikely to match 1:1 with the video frames, it might be the best option.
• Most importantly, most video and audio codecs are lossy and thus do not take well to being broken up into lots of pieces and then put back together. To do this without horribly mangling the quality, you need to first convert both video and audio into raw formats, manipulate those, and then re-transcode to compressed formats once you’ve done whatever you want to do with the pieces. You’ll still lose some quality, but not as much as otherwise.