FFmpeg 7.1
Since* 2.6
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Generate one palette for a whole video stream.

It accepts the following options:

max_colors

Set the maximum number of colors to quantize in the palette. Note: the palette will still contain 256 colors; the unused palette entries will be black.

reserve_transparent

Create a palette of 255 colors maximum and reserve the last one for transparency. Reserving the transparency color is useful for GIF optimization. If not set, the maximum of colors in the palette will be 256. You probably want to disable this option for a standalone image. Set by default.

transparency_color

Set the color that will be used as background for transparency.

stats_mode

Set statistics mode.

It accepts the following values:

full

Compute full frame histograms.

diff

Compute histograms only for the part that differs from previous frame. This might be relevant to give more importance to the moving part of your input if the background is static.

single

Compute new histogram for each frame.

Default value is full.

The filter also exports the frame metadata lavfi.color_quant_ratio (nb_color_in / nb_color_out) which you can use to evaluate the degree of color quantization of the palette. This information is also visible at info logging level.

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Examples

  • Generate a representative palette of a given video using ffmpeg:

    ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vf palettegen palette.png