While working on my Mosaic Image Generator, I realized I was going to need to generate a few thousand images. No better place to get images then from a video source. Now there are a few programs out there that will do this, but they wanted my money. VLC is free and comes with command line support and takes screenshots. Excellent!

Not that I really wanted to type out the commands every time I wanted to parse a video because it got be more like writing out a paragraph.

So, I quickly wrote up a simple tool to build the strings for me and remember all the fun stuff for me.  So given the options, it will build the string and fire up VLC which will play through the video and take a picture every x number of frames.

To do:

• Give it a start and end option so I don’t have to run through the entire video if part of it screwed up.
• Set it up to batch several files at a time… ie overnight

Here’s the source code