Is there a script that can take screenshots of random frames in a video file, with subtitles?

I could prolly write this for #Linux but I’d prefer to do so for #Windows

@realcaseyrollins I think a shell script around ffmpeg is the way to go.

-count_frames to get the range
-vf select to just grab a certain frame

Could I configure it to include subtitles?

@realcaseyrollins looks like you would just have to pass -copyts as an option alongside -vf select

I wasn’t able to get this to work for me, I’ll look around to see what works for me tho

@realcaseyrollins here's a Bash script that shows what I meant. Working from a random frame is slower than from a timestamp but it gets there in the end. You just have to provide two arguments: video file and subtitle file.

#!/bin/bash

framecount=$(ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -count_packets -show_entries stream=nb_read_packets -of csv=p=0 "$1");
(( randomframe = ( $RANDOM * 2**15 + $RANDOM ) % $framecount ));

ffmpeg -copyts -i "$1" -vf "subtitles=$2,select=gte(n\,$randomframe)" -vframes 1 "$1.png"

Does that work with #PGS subtitles? My copy of #ffmpeg is choking on the subtitles, although it can take screenshots without the subtitles well enough.

@realcaseyrollins the documentation suggests it's possible, but I don't think I have anything with PGS subtitles that I could test. If you point me to a test case I can download from somewhere, I'll take a look

If I gave you my file, that would be piracy 😂 And although I did use #ffmpeg to extract the #PGS subtitle into a .sup file, it’s too big for to file upload requirements here.