convert a heif file to png/jpg using ffmpeg

Question

The use case is very straight forward. Imagemagick is able to do the conversion but I want to do it with ffmpeg. Here is the all commands I have tried and all of them gives moov atom not found error.

ffmpeg -i /Users/ajitesh/Downloads/sample1.heif -c:v png -pix_fmt rgb48 /Users/ajitesh/Downloads/sample.png

Output

[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f85aa813200] moov atom not found
/Users/ajitesh/Downloads/sample1.heif: Invalid data found when processing input

it seems like moov atom is actually not present by trying to extract the location of moov atom using the following command

ffmpeg -v trace -i /Users/ajitesh/Downloads/sample1.heif 2>&1 | grep -e type:\'mdat\' -e type:\'moov\'

Output

[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f824c00f000] type:'mdat' parent:'root' sz: 2503083 420 2503495
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f824c00f000] type:'mdat' parent:'root' sz: 2503083 420 2503495

Catalogue

Answer 1

FFmpeg does not currently support HEIF decoding (as of 2021-01-11).

Check the bug report #6521: HEIF support as FFmpeg development is active and the situation may change in the future.

Toniatonic

For those of you who just want a command to convert files, I recommend sips on MacOS. apple.stackexchange.com/a/410920 – Arbitrate

Answer 2

Welp, it's 2023 and ffmpeg still doesn't support the heif image format. I recommend using heif-convert, which is available via all major linux package managers and homebrew.

Here are the instructions to install and use heif-convert on major Linux distributions and macOS. It's usage looks like this:

heif-convert input.[heic|heif] output.[png|jpg]

And you can install it via:

1. Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install libheif1

2. Fedora:

sudo dnf install libheif

3. RHEL/CentOS:

sudo yum install epel-release libheif

4. Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S libheif

5. openSUSE:

sudo zypper install libheif1

6. macOS:

brew install libheif

Breannabreanne

please update ubuntu, Command 'heif-convert' not found, but can be installed with: sudo apt install libheif-examples – Alegar

WSL works like a charm. – Esophagus

NixOS: nix-shell -p libheif works like a charm :-) – Varien