H264 videos do not have all features

1

Hi, I am trying to read specific frames from a h264 video file in Python. For webm this works, but for h264, several feature do not work.

for fileIn in [
    '/home/joris/data/youtube/Strawberry.webm',
    '/home/joris/data/youtube/Strawberry.h264'
]:
    print(fileIn)
    vidObj = cv2.VideoCapture(fileIn)
    print('Framerate:', int(vidObj.get(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS)))
    print('Frame count:', int(vidObj.get(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_COUNT)))
    vidObj.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES, 1000)
    print('Position:', int(vidObj.get(cv2.CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES)))
    print()

outputs

/home/joris/data/youtube/Strawberry.webm
Framerate: 29
Frame count: 5345
Position: 1000

/home/joris/data/youtube/Strawberry.h264
Framerate: 28
Frame count: -221617133663316
Position: 0

As you can see, the framecount is negative, and I cannot set CAP_PROP_FRAME_COUNT. Hence, I am forced to read through all earlier frames, but there are many of them in my application (not this simplified example).

Any tips/tricks?

2

Place your raw video files (h264) in containers (avi, mp4 etc.)

A raw video file such as h264 has no header infomation allowing you to seek to a specific point withing the file (frame) or detailing how many frames are available, it is simply the raw encoded video data with all the information required to decode it.

4

Is your response from chatgpt?

I’m asking because your answer is very general and doesn’t help when the a raw video file that has no meta data, additionaly

is a bit of a suspect addition.

1 Like
5

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Although that specific post didn’t contain obvious falsehoods, other posts by that user did. The "<lang>Copy code" strings showed up in several posts.

I would expect any (properly containered) video to at least report a correct video duration, which should be accurate… but I think I remember that OpenCV doesn’t expose such a property, although it does expose a frame count, which is merely calculated from duration and self-reported frame rate.

6

True but the user’s question was with reference to a raw .h264 file which unless I am mistaken doesn’t have any meta information regarding number of frames etc. It 100% can’t if its streamed from a camera but maybe it can in other circumstances when its length as apposed to start coded prefixed?