[MPlayer-users] How to run mplayer/mencoder *quickly* for storyboarding?

[Dan A. Dickey]

On Thursday 12 October 2006 07:30, Fabio Papa wrote:
> On Thursday 12 October 2006 14:22, Dan A. Dickey wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I've been using mplayer to create storyboard's for a video like this:
> > 	mplayer -really-quiet -nosound -vo pnm:ppm:outdir=./tmp -vf
> > framestep=i60,scale:96:72 thevideofile.mpg
> >
> > And it's been working pretty well, generating a bunch of ppm images
> > every 2 seconds in the video.  However, I just realized that it is
> > exactly that - they are being generated every 2 seconds - time wise. 
> > That's fine actually, and not the problem.  The problem is when I use a
> > video that is 15 minutes long, then the conversion to ppm images takes 15
> > minutes just as if mplayer was playing the video to a display.  Is there
> > a way to tell mplayer to *go fast* and not slow down?  Or is there a way
> > to get mencoder to perhaps do some portion of the work and then have
> > mplayer generate the images?  Any help would be much appreciated... 
> > Thanks! -Dan
>
> Not sure if it will work, but an idea is to pass -fps and a number greater
> than 30, which is the natural speed. 60 would go twice the speed, taking
> half the time. You could use 3000, for example.
>

Fabio,
thanks for your help!  It worked.  And led me to the '-benchmark'
switch which provides infinite fps.  Now, mplayer takes 16 seconds
to generate images from a 15 minute video instead of 15 minutes.  :)
Thanks again.
	-Dan

-- 
Dan A. Dickey
dan.dickey at savvis.net

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