Automatically take screenshots every few seconds from video

I did a similar thing about a year ago. Someone wanted thumbnails for each video they had on a website, and i noticed the graphic designer sitting there in a media player taking snapshots and then resizing them in photoshop over and over again. after some googling I got this ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.flv -f mjpeg -vframes 1 -ss 10 output.jpg

I had a nautilus script written in python which converts an image to jpg in my context menu, so i substituted the 'convert' shell command with the FFMpeg one and now all i need to do is right click on a video file to get a screen shot at 10 seconds.

It was at that moment I felt that I made the right choice in using a Linux based desktop OS. The terminal/bash is an excellent tool for automation, and even though you could achieve the same on OSX and Windows, it feels to me that the terminal is a first class citizen on Linux.

Nice tip, but I was even more excited to learn that Dirk Gently had a brief TV adaptation this past year. I might be verging on blasphemy here, but I almost think I like those books better than HHGG these days.