In this blog, we will see how to Read, Write and Display Videos using OpenCV. Since a video is made up of images, most of the commands we learned in the previous blog also applies here.

Let’s see by an example how to capture video from the camera and display it.

cv2.VideoCapture(0) will open the default camera. You can select the second camera by passing 1, third by passing 2 and so on. This creates a VideoCapture object (“cap” here).

cap.read() capture frame by frame. This returns two values, frame and ret. If the frame is read correctly, ret will be True otherwise False.

cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == ord(‘q’) will exit the video when ‘q’ is pressed.

cap.release() closes video file or capturing device.

If you want to play a video from a file, just change the cv2.VideoCapture(0) function in the above code by giving the file path as cv2.VideoCapture(‘F:/downloads/Python.mp4’). Also, use the appropriate time for cv2.waitKey() function (25 will be OK).

Saving a Video:

First, create a VideoWriter object with cv2.VideoWriter(output filename, fourcc, fps, frameSize). fourcc(4-character code of codec) is used to compress the frames. After creating this object, use object.write() to save the video. Let’s see an example

Now, you might have got some feeling about the basic video commands in OpenCV. Hope you enjoy reading.

If you have any doubt/suggestion please feel free to ask and I will do my best to help or improve myself. Good-bye until next time.