How to extract 1 screenshot for a video with ffmpeg at a given time?

There are many tutorials and stuff showing how to extract multiple screenshots from a video using ffmpeg. You set -r and you can even start a certain amount in.

But I just want 1 screenshot at, say 01:23:45 in. Or 1 screenshot at 86% in.

This is all possible with ffmpegthumbnailer but it's another dependency I don't want to depend on. I want to be able to do it with ffmpeg.

Use the -ss option:

ffmpeg -ss 01:23:45 -i input -frames:v 1 -q:v 2 output.jpg

• For JPEG output use -q:v to control output quality. Full range is a linear scale of 1-31 where a lower value results in a higher quality. 2-5 is a good range to try.

• The select filter provides an alternative method for more complex needs such as selecting only certain frame types, or 1 per 100, etc.

• Placing -ss before the input will be faster. See FFmpeg Wiki: Seeking and this excerpt from the ffmpeg cli tool documentation:

> -ss position (input/output) > > When used as an input option (before -i), seeks in this input file to position. Note the in most formats it is not possible to seek > exactly, so ffmpeg will seek to the closest seek point before > position. When transcoding and -accurate_seek is enabled (the > default), this extra segment between the seek point and position will > be decoded and discarded. When doing stream copy or when > -noaccurate_seek is used, it will be preserved. > > When used as an output option (before an output filename), decodes but discards input until the timestamps reach position. > > position may be either in seconds or in hh:mm:ss[.xxx] form.

FFMpeg can do this by seeking to the given timestamp and extracting exactly one frame as an image, see for instance:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -ss 01:23:45 -vframes 1 output.jpg

Let's explain the options:

-i input file           the path to the input file
-ss 01:23:45            seek the position to the specified timestamp
-vframes 1              only handle one video frame
output.jpg              output filename, should have a well-known extension

The -ss parameter accepts a value in the form HH:MM:SS[.xxx] or as a number in seconds. If you need a percentage, you need to compute the video duration beforehand.