How can I extract text from video?

[Fiona]

Hi members, advice on software, please.
I'm needing to capture 26 000 of our client's details (name and tel no) onto a spreadsheet. The only way we were able to save the data before the app we were using crashed, was by videoing the info. I found a possible solution using an OCR - optical character recognition BUT it means pausing the video to screenshot the info so that the OCR software can turn it into text which can then be entered onto a spreadsheet. Very time-consuming, to say the least! My question is: does anyone of you clever people know of a quicker way to do this? Software that can grab straight from video without having to screenshot every couple of rows? Any help would be amazing!!

 

[Bree]

The only way we were able to save the data before the app we were using crashed, was by videoing the info

It may help if you first extract a sequence of images from the video. Then you can use OCR directly on the image files.

The free open source command line utility FFmpeg can do that. For example, this command will extract frames at a rate one per second of video from the video Input.mp4 and save them as a series of image files named Image_1.png, Image_2.png, etc.

FFmpeg -i Input.mp4 -r 1 Image_%d.png
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FFmpeg

ffmpeg.org