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I want to know if it's possible to record four H264 video files with PiCamera with a specific frame ?

For example, I am recording 10 seconds of video at 4 fps. So normally, I will get a video file of 10 seconds with 40 frames. But now what I am trying to do, it's taking the:

  • 1st frame and put it into CAM1.h264
  • take the 2nd frame and put it into CAM2.h264
  • take the 3rd frame and put in into CAM3.H264
  • take the 4th frame and put it into CAM4.h264
  • take the 5th frame and put in into CAM1.h264
  • take the 6th frame and put in into CAM2.h264
  • take the 7rd frame and put in into CAM3.H264
  • take the 8th frame and put it into CAM4.h264
  • take the 9th frame and put in into CAM1.h264
  • take the 10th frame and put in into CAM2.h264
  • take the 11rd frame and put in into CAM3.H264
  • take the 12th frame and put it into CAM4.h264 etc.

How may I accomplish this ? With a stream ?

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  • I don't think you'll be able to do this in real time, but I've got a feeling you might be able to do some frame splicing after recording using ffmpeg. Would that be acceptable?
    – goobering
    Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 22:23
  • Hi, thanks for your quick reply ! Do you have an example of code that I can use for the Frame Splicing after recording using FFMPEG ? It could be a good idea !
    – Alexandre Dupont
    Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 22:33
  • I have a camera that takes pics at slow intervals and ffmpeg combines then into a video. You could dump your video to pics and combine them into four videos with four commands.
    – PaulF8080
    Commented Apr 7, 2016 at 1:07
  • Hi PaulF8080, thanks for your fast reply ! Do you have any tutorial or links on how I can acheived this properly ?
    – Alexandre Dupont
    Commented Apr 7, 2016 at 1:33
  • I do not understand your question, you say you want a new file per frame, but why would you want that in h264 format. When it would be much simpler to write a small script to take 4 photos per second for 10 seconds and a script may give you more control over the file naming.
    – Mohammad Ali
    Commented Apr 7, 2016 at 3:45

1 Answer 1

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OK. Lots of fun head scratching trying to remember how expressions work in ffmpeg!

This is still fairly non-optimal - you need to run a separate ffmpeg pass for the frame 1,5,9... video, the frame 2,6,10... video, the frame 3,7,11 video, etc. This could probably be automated with a small script. I'm also unsure of how long all this will take - the time required will depend on your source footage.

Where in.mp4 is your input video file:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n\,4))" -vsync vfr out1.mp4
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n+1\,4))" -vsync vfr out2.mp4
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n+2\,4))" -vsync vfr out3.mp4
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n+3\,4))" -vsync vfr out4.mp4

This uses the select filter to define which frames to output. The documentation describes my expression components as:

  • mod(x, y): Compute the remainder of division of x by y.
  • not(expr): Return 1.0 if expr is zero, 0.0 otherwise.
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