Nice writeup, the dominant color approach looks promising. I've also tried something similar using averaging. Not sure if this is any better than your solution

Nice writeup, the dominant color approach looks promising. I've also tried something similar using averaging. Not sure if this is any better than your solution, but my approach with ffmpeg was this command: ffmpeg -i "$myvideo" -r 1 -threads 4 -s 320x240 -vcodec mjpeg img%04d.jpg The -r flag sets the framerate to 1, which in my understanding gets a frame per second. I also used all the cores of my laptop. The -s flag just does the same thing as your filter, though in my case I also fudged the aspect ratio of the resulting frames. I chose to save in jpeg to save some minuscule space. In my approach I squashed each frame horizontally to one pixel, so I get vertical slivers that average each frame. Then I just added them all together horizontally. Here is the result of that for Requiem for a Dream before resizing [0] and after [1] to get a better overview. In terms of usefulness it might not give too much information, but it's nice to look at and sometimes you can even spot individual scenes. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/SgpYOoD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SgpYOoD.jpg [1]: http://i.imgur.com/pDGvlgb.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pDGvlgb.jpg