Listing some of the commands that I am using these days while working with FFmpeg. Some readers may find them useful.

analyse motion vector data of any supported input video stream

ffplay -flags2 +export_mvs input.mp4 -vf codecview=mv=pf+bf+bb
ffmpeg -flags2 +export_mvs -i input.mp4 -vf codecview=mv=pf+bf+bb output.mp4

Convert any file to YUV420 file. Pixel format is YUV420P

ffmpeg -i akiyo.mp4 -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p akiyo.yuv

Convert any video file to HEVC using libx265

ffmpeg -i  input.mp4 -c:a copy -c:v libx265 out-hevc.mp4

Control frame rate to 5fps and play in full screen mode

ffplay -framerate 5 -fs str.bin

Play video files using FFPlay

ffplay akiyo.mp4

ffplay str.bin

Show all frame information, print frame wise information on terminal, can be modified to print on a file instead

ffprobe -show_frames  str.bin

Count number of frames in any video stream

ffprobe -v error -count_frames -select_streams v:0  -show_entries stream=nb_read_frames -of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 str.bin

Options description

• -v error This hides “info” output (version info, etc) which makes parsing easier.
• -count_frames Count the number of frames per stream and report it in the corresponding stream section.
• -select_streams v:0 Select only the video stream.
• -show_entries stream=nb_read_frames Show only the number of read frames.
• -of default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 Set output format (aka the “writer”) to default, do not print the key of each field (nokey=1), and do not print the section header and footer (noprint_wrappers=1).

Extract Y, U and V components of a video sequence in separate video files

ffmpeg -i akiyo.mp4 -filter_complex 'extractplanes=y+u+v[y][u][v]' -map '[y]' y.avi -map '[u]' u.avi -map '[v]' v.avi

ffmpeg -i akiyo.mp4 -filter_complex 'fade=in:0:100' output.hevc

• akiyo.mp4 was approximately 470KB, it’s raw YUV is 42MB. The str.bin after HEVC main compression is 23.9KB for same visual quality

• YUV name & size	MP4 file size	QP	PSNR	HEVC .bin size
  akiyo.yuv	470KB	32	40.48	23.9KB
  akiyo.yuv	470KB	51	28.94	5.4KB
  akiyo.yuv	470KB	20	47.21	151.4KB