[Eric Work]

The plotframes tool, which is part of the FFMPEG repository, was written in Perl and is very slow for large files. I wrote my own version of this tool using Python 3 which is much faster. Instead of reading the entire JSON output from FFProbe before processing begins my script pipes XML data from FFProbe and uses a stream XML processor to parse the frame data. Matplotlib is then used to plot the data which requires no temporary files. The result is about 5-10% overhead over FFProbe. The major bottleneck when processing an HD video that’s 3+ hours long is FFProbe. I got tired of waiting after 2 hours for plotframes to even start generating the temp files for a 3 hour movie, while my script was done in 40 min. You can find my script in my github repo below.

https://github.com/zeroepoch/plotbitrate