Capture frames from a WebCam

Capture images from Webcam

Here we have a WebCam (Insta360 One-R with 4K camera mod) presenting itself as /dev/video1 on a Raspberry PI

To capture images every 10 seconds we can use:

1ffmpeg -f v4l2 -i /dev/video1 -r 1/10 out%08d.jpg

Here -i /dev/video1 is the camera's device, -r 1/10 is the capturing framerate, 1 in every 10 seconds and out%08d.jpeg is the filename for each frame generated.

Parameter Description
-f v4l2 Tell ffmpeg we are reading from v4l2 (Video For Linux 2)
-i /dev/video1 The V4L2 device of the camera to capture from
-r 1/10 The frame rate
out%08d.jpg The frame filename to write.

Here the frame rate is the capture rate in frames per second. So 1/10 means that we capture a single frame once every 10 seconds.

For the frame filename pattern, %08d will be replaced by the frame number, in this case 8 digits with leading 0's.


Last modified November 11, 2021: Change format of command lines (522944e)