How can I use ffmpeg and youtube-dl to download the first frame of every video in a playlist?

Question

I'm trying to download only the first frame of every video in a large playlist on YouTube. Does anybody know how I can use ffmpeg and youtube-dl to do this?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65650733/how-can-i-use-ffmpeg-and-youtube-dl-to-download-the-first-frame-of-every-video-i

Answer 1

First you need to take the playlist ID of the youtube playlist and download the full playlist of the thumbnails you want to get like this:

youtube-dl -i PLwJ2VKmefmxpUJEGB1ff6yUZ5Zd7Gegn2

Then you use the following script, which will extract the first frame of the all the videos, (do note that after downloading the full playlist all of the videos are in the same directory):

i=1
for avi in *.mp4; do
    name=`echo $avi | cut -f1 -d'.'`
    jpg_ext='.jpg'
    echo "$i": extracting the first frame of the video "$avi" into "$name$jpg_ext"
    ffmpeg -loglevel panic -i $avi -vframes 1 -f image2 "$name$jpg_ext"
    i=$((i+1))
 done