Converting a single M2V frame into JPEG under OSX

I needed to view a single frame of a m2v file that had been encoded by our designers for playing out on TV. The file name was .mpg but in actuality it was a single .m2v frame renamed to be a .mpg. Windows Media Player classic used to display the frame fine when I opened the file normally, under Windows XP. However now I have switched to a Mac, I have found that Quicktime and VLC refused to display the single frame. I couldn’t find a video player that would open the single frame. So I resorted to the command line version of ffmpeg, which I installed via macports, to convert this single frame to a jpg file to view as normal. This line worked a treat:

ffmpeg -i north.mpg -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:1 -s 1024x768 -r 1 -f mjpeg north.jpg

Where ‘north.mpg’ was the m2v file, and ‘north.jpg’ was the output jpeg.

And this:

find -name *.mpg -exec ffmpeg -i {} -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:1 -s 1024x768 -r 1 -f mjpeg {}.jpg ;

Will go through all the mpg files in the current directory and below, and create their jpeg single frame equivalents, ie: for north.mpg it will create north.mpg.jpg.