As I was playing with Ogg Theora lots for LCA, I needed to script the extraction of keyframes from Ogg Theora files.

There’s a manual way to achieve this through totem: you just use ctrl-s to capture a frame. However, I didn’t want to do this for every one of the hundreds of videos that we captured.

Here’s a script that I found somewhere and might work for you, but it didn’t work for me:

dumpvideo foo.ogg | yuv2ppm | pnmsplit - image-%d.ppm; for file in image-*.ppm; do convert $file `basename $file .ppm`.jpeg; done


What worked for me in the end was a nice and simple call to mplayer:

mplayer -ss 120 -frames 1 -vo jpeg $file