Python - Extracting and Saving Video Frames

Question

So I've followed this tutorial but it doesn't seem to do anything. Simply nothing. It waits a few seconds and closes the program. What is wrong with this code?

import cv2
vidcap = cv2.VideoCapture('Compton.mp4')
success,image = vidcap.read()
count = 0
success = True
while success:
  success,image = vidcap.read()
  cv2.imwrite("frame%d.jpg" % count, image)     # save frame as JPEG file
  if cv2.waitKey(10) == 27:                     # exit if Escape is hit
      break
  count += 1

Also, in the comments it says that this limits the frames to 1000? Why?

EDIT: I tried doing success = True first but that didn't help. It only created one image that was 0 bytes.

Answer 1

From here download this video so we have the same video file for the test. Make sure to have that mp4 file in the same directory of your python code. Then also make sure to run the python interpreter from the same directory.

Then modify the code, ditch waitKey that's wasting time also without a window it cannot capture the keyboard events. Also we print the success value to make sure it's reading the frames successfully.

import cv2
vidcap = cv2.VideoCapture('big_buck_bunny_720p_5mb.mp4')
success,image = vidcap.read()
count = 0
while success:
  cv2.imwrite("frame%d.jpg" % count, image)     # save frame as JPEG file      
  success,image = vidcap.read()
  print('Read a new frame: ', success)
  count += 1

How does that go?