Last week’s installment was about a powerful open-source tool, Blender, and this week’s is about another high-powered open-source tool that can help you perform more detailed analyses of videos, for free.

Video tool I’m finally starting to make progress with

​Axon Investigate (formerly iNPUT-ACE) and Amped FIVE are incredibly robust and useful tools for forensic video analysis; however, it’s usually possible to achieve the desired task with the OG video tool, FFmpeg, and it won’t cost you a dime. From their site:

“FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation.”

The full installation includes FFprobe and FFplay. This magic trio can play almost any file, convert files, and be used to perform analyses of file formats, macroblocks, frame properties, frame timing, etc. There are a thousand other functions that I don't even know about yet.

It’s not an easy program to learn, even installing it was a pain in the butt until recently, when this method popped up. This process makes installation and updating easy as apple pie, which is a huge step forward.

While still a bit daunting, ffmpeg.org provides a lot of resources, and I’ll be sharing some of my key insights and methods as I continue to explore this super powerful tool. Specifically, I've been developing a batch file to automate a key function for forensics with the guidance of a colleague (a name you'll recognize) and I'll pass that along when it's ready for primetime. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading along!

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom​

P.S. Good one, Denis.