ffmpeg is video encoder / decoder. You might be able to use the Python bindings for it to grab a single frame of video from the video file, and save that as a PNG or JPG.
This is the project page for the ffmpeg bindings: http://code.google.com/p/pyffmpeg/ I've never done this before myself, but looking at the documentation (at least for version 1), you should be able to do something like this once you've got pyffmpeg installed: import pyffmpeg stream = pyffmpeg.VideoStream() stream.open('myvideo.avi') image = stream.GetFrameNo(0) image.save('firstframe.png')
