Question

I can open a video and play it with opencv 2 using the cv2.VideoCapture(myvideo). But is there a way to delete a frame within that video using opencv 2? The deletion must happen in-place, that is, the file being played will end up with a shorter time due to deleted frames. Simply zeroing out the matrix wouldn’t be sufficient.

For example something like:

video = cv2.VideoCapture(myvideo.flv)

while True:
    img = video.read()

    # Show the image
    cv2.imgshow(img)

    # Then go delete it and proceed to next frame, but is this possible?
    # delete(img)??

So the above code would technically contain 0 bytes at the end since it reads then deletes the frame in the video file.

Answer 1

OpenCV is not the right tool for this job. What you need for this is a media processing framework, like ffmpeg (=libavformat/libavcodec/libswscale) or GStreamer.

Also depending on the encoding scheme used, simply deleting just a single frame may not be possible. Only in a video consisting of just Intra frames (I-frames), frame exact editing is possible. If the video is encoding in so called group of pictures (GOP) removing a single frame requires to reencode the whole GOP it was part of.