I normally use ThumbnailMe to make contact sheets of thumbnails. My default setting is 15 rows x 5 columns, so 75 images, in videos that are anywhere from 45 minutes to around 90 minutes. ThumbnailMe makes a contact sheet of this size virtually instantaneously. A recent requirement to make a LOT of contact sheets for a LOT of videos has me looking at a command line option so I can do these in batches. I've tried a couple different ways to make the thumbnails from the command line:

```
ffmpeg -ss 300 -i myvideo.avi -vf fps=1/300 %d.jpg

```

or

```
ffmpeg -i myvideo.avi -vf fps=1/60 %d.jpg

```

No matter which of these methods I use it takes roughly a minute to make just 16 screenshots (from there I would use ImageMagick to make the contact sheet). As I said above, ThumbnailMe can make a 15x5 grid of images at the mere press of a button. ThumbnailMe is built on an older command line program, Movie Thumbnailer, which I think used an old version of ffmpeg, or at least the codec libavcodec.

If these other programs can create thumbnails so quickly why does it take ffmpeg so long to make them for me? Even if I output the screenshots in a very small size, say 50x50, it still takes ~2 secs for each image to be created.