R, edit movie files or avi files? - r

Question

I have a bunch of .avi files I would like to load into R, breakdown each frame as an individual image, arrange the images, and save as a separate image. In spite of a sincere effort to try to find a package to load .avi files, I can't find anything.
1) is it possible to load and work with avi files in r?
2) how is this done?
3) is there a specific library for this?
Ive seen several examples using linux, such as this post, but I'm hoping for an R solution.
Converting AVI Frames to JPGs on Linux

Answer 1

I figured this out. As indicated in the comments section, ffmpeg is the package called by various packages in R to load videos into the R environment. The Imager package has a function called "load.video.internal" that works well and uses ffmpeg. I had to down load the package from github because this function was not available in the version I installed using "install.packages". I ended up copy/pasting the function from the source package and commenting out the reference to the "has.ffmpeg" function because it kept hanging at this step. Using paste, I was able to indicate the file path and load an avi file successfully.
Modified load.video.internal function:
load.video.internal <- function(fname,maxSize=1,skip.to=0,frames=NULL,fps=NULL,extra.args="",verbose=FALSE)
{
# if (!has.ffmpeg()) stop("Can't find ffmpeg. Please install.")
dd <- paste0(tempdir(),"/vid")
if (!is.null(frames)) extra.args <- sprintf("%s -vframes %i ",extra.args,frames)
if (!is.null(fps)) extra.args <- sprintf("%s -vf fps=%.4d ",extra.args,fps)
arg <- sprintf("-i %s %s -ss %s ",fname,extra.args,as.character(skip.to)) %>% paste0(dd,"/image-%d.bmp")
tryCatch({
dir.create(dd)
system2("ffmpeg",arg,stdout=verbose,stderr=verbose)
fls <- dir(dd,full.names=TRUE)
if (length(fls)==0) stop("No output was generated")
ordr <- stringr::str_extract(fls,"(\\d)+\\.bmp") %>% stringr::str_split(stringr::fixed(".")) %>% purrr::map_int(~ as.integer(.[[1]])) %>% order
fls <- fls[ordr]
#Check total size
imsz <- load.image(fls[[1]]) %>% dim %>% prod
tsz <- ((imsz*8)*length(fls))/(1024^3)
if (tsz > maxSize)
{
msg <- sprintf("Video exceeds maximum allowed size in memory (%.2d Gb out of %.2d Gb)",tsz,maxSize)
unlink(dd,recursive=TRUE)
stop(msg)
}
else
{
out <- map_il(fls,load.image) %>% imappend("z")
out
} },
finally=unlink(dd,recursive=TRUE))
}
Example of its use:
vid_in <- load.video.internal(paste("/home/phil/Documents/avi_files/Untitled.avi"))
UPDATED SIMPLER VERSION:
the magick package will read avi files using the image_read function.