How to create a slideshow with FFmpeg

I am a fan of 80s Italo Disco music. DoorDarshan regularly used to show quite a lot of them in the program Top of the Pops. This was well before MTV. One song that has remained in my memory after all these years is Hot Girl by Italian singer Sabrina Salerno. I had remembered the tune of the song but not the lyrics or the name of the singer. I had seen Sabrina's image on several video thumbnails before but today I was surprised to find one of my favorite songs was performed by her. (Her other songs such as ‘Boys’ or ‘Yeah, Yeah’ required several viewings to acquire a taste but Hot Girl seems to have made a lasting impression with just one viewing.)

I found several videos of the same song. The ones recorded for TV audiences (similar to Top of the Pops) did not have good audio, as they were originally recorded on VHS tapes. The videos with good audio did not have any video, just a static album art of the record. So, I used the good audio and slipstreamed my own slideshow of her online publicity images.

ffmpeg -y \
       -i Sabrina-Hot-Girl.mp4 \
       -loop 1 -framerate 1/3 -i sabrina%02d.jpg \
       -filter_complex \
          "[1:v:0]scale=eval=frame:w=640:h=480: force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=640:480:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black[v]" \
       -shortest -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 12 \
       -map '[v]' -map 0:a:0 \
       Sabrina-Hot-girl-slideshow.mp4

To craft this command, I used to two commands from my FFmpeg book. One created an audio-less slideshow from a series of images. The other used a static image and looped it for the entire duration of an audio track. (The -loop 1 option is from the image2 demuxer.) The above command is an improvement over the two old ones.

This video only has less than one-and-a-half a minute of her song to protect her copyright.

Stop panting 😜! Ms. Salerno is from the 80s so please remember that she is someone's grandmother. (She does look like this even today.)

Some other Europop songs that I still remember are:

• Power of Love by Jennifer Rush — This song was made more famous many years later by Celine Dion.
• Shaddup your face by Joe Dolce

Repeat audio for the duration of images

In the above slideshow, I repeated (looped) the slideshow of images for the entire duration of one song. What if I need to loop the audio for the duration of one slideshow?

ffmpeg -y \
       -framerate 1/3 -i image_%03d.jpg \
       -stream_loop -1 -i background_music.mp3 \
       -filter_complex \
          "[0:v:0]scale=eval=frame:w=1280:h=720: force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:orange,setdar=dar=1280/720[v]" \
       -r 12 \
       -map '[v]' -map 1:a:0 \
       -c:v libx265 -crf 28 \
       -c:a libfdk_aac -vbr 5 -ac 2 \
       -shortest \
       image-slideshow.mkv

In this command, -stream-loop is a main FFmpeg option. It is not related to the image2 demuxer like -loop.

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