The VideoLAN Forums

OK, I give up. I've been trying to do this for two hours now.In past versions of VLC, there was something like "save to disk" listed in the output module. Not so anymore. I simply want to save ALL frames to disk. ALL OF THEM. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I have googled and the only thing I found was some "scene" module and cryptic command line commands. I tried it, but it only grabbed images every few seconds. I want them ALL.

How do I do this? Why is it so complicated. The past versions did it so simple way. The new versions do not.

I just need to exract the frames of a single, 25-second clip, nothing more.

(Sorry if I sound bitchy, but I am really tired at this. I just want it done. Tell me exact steps, because my brains cannot play hide-and-seek with this thing anymore.)

That's a job for the YUV output. It's still there.

OK, the YUV mode produces gigantic "stream.yuv" file. How do I decode it?

Why not just save the frames as individual files? It just appears to transcode the video to different format!

Judging from the lack of replies, I'm guessing it is impossible then. Great.

I'm off to find some 0.8.x version of VLC now, those can do things these new versions can't.

Unfortunately the old 0.8.x version I found does not play back the file. It's a MOV. The newer versions play, but cannot save the frames.
Back into square one.

Any suggestions?

The YUV output record the frames in the so-called Mplayer format.

The scene filter defaults to saving one frame every 50, but you can configure the ratio to 1 if you really want.

OK. I tried the scene filter with --scene-ratio=1 and it did work, except about half of the images are zero-sized and thus empty.

Any other ideas?

Hello? Anyone?

I guess it really is impossible then. I did find a workaround though: just when the video starts to play, I pause it. Then, for each frame I take a screenshot (shift+s) and advance to the next frame (e). It loses few first frames but they are empty anyway. It took me ages but I finally got what I wanted. Not sure if I want to do it again, though...

Empty pictures sound like your system ran out of resources. I'm not entirely surprised considering the bandwidth of raw video. You should lower the playback rate.

Better yet transcode to raw a YUV file so VLC will adapt to the system capacity (obviously that will generate one big file with all pictures concatenated).