Re-execute the command with the backtick operator in order to get all outputs $ERROR = 'Error executing FFmpeg - Return value: $retval' It should do the complete job for you.Previous Post Next Post Generate thumbnails of video – PHP & FFmpeg You can use the Python script pyvideothumbnailer found on GitHub, which uses MoviePy, MediaInfo and the PIL fork Pillow. (Disclaimer: I haven't used the Python interface before, but I know ImageMagick is good mojo.) Look into PythonMagick, a Python interface to ImageMagick. Honestly, that's the easiest way to handle online video and I'm not just shilling a 3rd party service, I'm a very happy user of that API and the internal video paths I was able to delete thanks to it. You could use the Youtube API for storage and transcoding and grab the feed thumbnails for free. When you get a video frame it can be very black, white etc to get some good thumbnail you can specify the mean value of all the pixel in the frame. Res, thumb_buf = cv2.imencode('.png', im_ar) #2)save on a buffer for direct transmission Im_ar = cv2.resize(im_ar, (thumb_width, thumb_height), 0, 0, cv2.INTER_LINEAR) Pil_image = VideoStream('0.flv').get_frame_at_sec(5).image() You can use ffvideo from ffvideo import VideoStream I could not install ffvideo on OSX Sierra so i decided to work with ffmpeg. PyMedia lets you extract the frames (using the decoder() routine), while PIL has a simple thumbnail() routine. A simple combination of PyMedia and PIL would do the trick for AVI, ASF, or MPEG files.

Python ffmpeg generate video thubnail