framestrip

Turn a video into a short, deduplicated, timestamped frame strip.

framestrip decodes a video through the system ffmpeg binary (ffmpeg-sidecar, no build-time linking), samples it at a fixed rate, perceptually hashes every sampled frame, keeps a frame only when it differs from the last kept one, thins to a hard frame cap by dropping the smallest transitions, and returns every kept frame as JPEG with its source timestamp and how long that screen stayed on.

It exists so a language model can look at a screen recording as "screen A held 16 s, toast at 00:24, screen B" instead of sixty near-identical frames.

let strip = framestrip::extract(Path::new("recording.mp4"), &framestrip::Options::default())?;
for frame in &strip.frames {
    println!("t={}ms held={}ms {} bytes", frame.ts_ms, frame.held_ms, frame.bytes.len());
}

Requires ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH. Without them framestrip::tooling() returns Error::ToolingUnavailable and nothing else runs.

Design notes

• Consecutive-only comparison: returning to an earlier screen later in the recording is itself a fact, so it stays.
• Pure selection helpers (select) are unit-tested without ffmpeg; the integration tests generate fixtures with ffmpeg -f lavfi and skip when the binary is missing.

License: MIT.