How to read quicktime videos (not via active x)

[ThomasGutzler]

Hi,

 

I've got a bunch of quicktime videos that I'd like to analyse - open them and do some image processing on every frame. From what I understand, that cannot be done with the quicktime ActiveX object. I've looked through the methods and properties and I couldn't find anything that would let me extract a single frame.

 

So, I'm opening the topic again: How can I read quicktime .mov videos (on windows)?

 

All I found was Chris's Quicktime VIs, which, to me, seems like a half finished job. It works but it's not great. The biggest problem I have is that it takes a very long time to read a video file - even if I don't display the frames in a picture control. This snippet here (you need to get the qtlib for it to work) runs at just 20fps for a 640x480 video:

 

Is there anything better out there?

 

Cheers,

  Tom

[hooovahh]

I can't seem to find it at the moment, but I remember seeing a post someone made at NI's forums where they used VLC to perform an operation similar to what you are asking using ActiveX.  It didn't fully work but I saw what they were going for and maybe that is an option.  VLC by the way plays just about everything under the sun and I'd be surprised if it didn't play mov files.

 

Since I can't provide a link to that idea here is another topic very close recommending a command line call to FFMPEG which might be useful too.  Oh here is another similar topic.

[ThomasGutzler]

Thanks hooovahh,

I think I'll go with ffmpeg. Dumping the video in jpeg/png files using ffmpeg is very easy. Not sure if it's faster though.

I'll have to invest some time to figure how I can use the ffmpeg libraries directly to read my frames. Will keep you posted.

Edited March 24, 2014 by ThomasGutzler