Use ffmpeg for JPEG to TIFF conversion

Question

I would like to use Tesseract OCR with a video.

With ffmpeg I can export some (.jpeg) images from a video. Can I convert a .jpeg into a valid .tiff or export directly .tiff images from the video with ffmpeg?

Answer 1

Converting to TIFF

You can convert a JPEG to TIFF:

ffmpeg -i input.jpeg -pix_fmt rgba output.tiff

Or from a video:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -pix_fmt rgba out%05d.tiff

What's important is specifying the RGBA colorspace via -pix_fmt rgba. Keeping the YUV 4:2:0 colorspace from video (-pix_fmt yuv420p) would produce TIFF files that cannot be opened in most programs (even though the YCbCr^* colorspace is allowed).

How to compress output

By default this produces uncompressed TIFF images. You can choose a different compression algorithm using the -compression_algo option:

ffmpeg -i input.jpeg -pix_fmt rgb24 -compression_algo lzw output.tiff

Valid options are packbits, raw, lzw and deflate (see ffmpeg -h encoder=tiff).

_{* YCbCr refers to what in video compression is usually known as YUV}