FFchapters - FFmpeg based chapter creation

About

Movies for e.g. created from TV recordings do not have any chapters. These chapters can be generated by using FFMpeg and FFchapters. FFmpeg is capable of finding scene changes via video filter. The problem is that FFmpeg does not create a regular chapter file out of this information. Therefore these scene changes can be extracted by FFchapters which will create a standard chapter file usable for e.g. with Matroska.

FFchapters is discontinued. Please refer to the new FFchapters2 Project.

Workflow

The workflow is:

• generate with FFmpeg a raw log file which contains the the scene changes
• generate with FFchapters a regular chapter file out of this raw log file

Example

FFmpeg scene detection of a movie file using video filters: Scene, Black and Blackframe detection

FFmpeg -i "Video_File" -vf blackdetect=d=1.0:pic_th=0.90:pix_th=0.00,blackframe=98:32,"select='gt(scene,0.75)',showinfo" -an -f null - 2> "FFmpeg_Log_File"

FFchapters chapter generation out of above created FFmpeg log file with around 5 minutes (300 seconds) duration between each chapter

FFchapters -i "FFmpeg_Log_File" -o "Chapter_Output_File" -s 300

Result

The created "Chapter_Output_File" can now be used with video (muxer) tools for e.g. with MKVToolNix GUI as chapter input file.