Detect video intervals that are (almost) completely black. Can be useful to detect chapter transitions, commercials, or invalid recordings. Output lines contains the time for the start, end and duration of the detected black interval expressed in seconds.

In order to display the output lines, you need to set the loglevel at least to the AV_LOG_INFO value.

The filter accepts the following options:

black_min_duration, d

Set the minimum detected black duration expressed in seconds. It must be a non-negative floating point number.

Default value is 2.0.

picture_black_ratio_th, pic_th

Set the threshold for considering a picture "black". Express the minimum value for the ratio:

nb_black_pixels / nb_pixels

for which a picture is considered black. Default value is 0.98.

pixel_black_th, pix_th

Set the threshold for considering a pixel "black".

The threshold expresses the maximum pixel luminance value for which a pixel is considered "black". The provided value is scaled according to the following equation:

absolute_threshold = luminance_minimum_value + pixel_black_th * luminance_range_size

luminance_range_size and luminance_minimum_value depend on the input video format, the range is [0-255] for YUV full-range formats and [16-235] for YUV non full-range formats.

Default value is 0.10.

The following example sets the maximum pixel threshold to the minimum value, and detects only black intervals of 2 or more seconds:

blackdetect=d=2:pix_th=0.00