[removed] Extract video frames reliably

Question

I\'m working on a client-side project which lets a user supply a video file and apply basic manipulations to it. I\'m trying to extract the frames from the video reliably.

Answer 1

Mostly taken from this great answer by GameAlchemist :

Since browsers doesn't respect videos' framerates, but instead "use of some tricks to make a match between the frame-rate of the movie and the refresh-rate of the screen", your assumption that every 30th of a second, a new frame will be painted is quite inaccurate.
However, the timeupdate event should fire when the currentTime has changed, and we can assume that a new frame was painted.

So, I would do it like so :

document.querySelector('input').addEventListener('change', extractFrames, false);

function extractFrames() {
  var video = document.createElement('video');
  var array = [];
  var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
  var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
  var pro = document.querySelector('#progress');

  function initCanvas(e) {
    canvas.width = this.videoWidth;
    canvas.height = this.videoHeight;
  }

  function drawFrame(e) {
    this.pause();
    ctx.drawImage(this, 0, 0);
    /* 
    this will save as a Blob, less memory consumptive than toDataURL
    a polyfill can be found at
    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasElement/toBlob#Polyfill
    */
    canvas.toBlob(saveFrame, 'image/jpeg');
    pro.innerHTML = ((this.currentTime / this.duration) * 100).toFixed(2) + ' %';
    if (this.currentTime < this.duration) {
      this.play();
    }
  }

  function saveFrame(blob) {
    array.push(blob);
  }

  function revokeURL(e) {
    URL.revokeObjectURL(this.src);
  }
  
  function onend(e) {
    var img;
    // do whatever with the frames
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
      img = new Image();
      img.onload = revokeURL;
      img.src = URL.createObjectURL(array[i]);
      document.body.appendChild(img);
    }
    // we don't need the video's objectURL anymore
    URL.revokeObjectURL(this.src);
  }
  
  video.muted = true;

  video.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', initCanvas, false);
  video.addEventListener('timeupdate', drawFrame, false);
  video.addEventListener('ended', onend, false);

  video.src = URL.createObjectURL(this.files[0]);
  video.play();
}