Here is a task that comes up constantly. You are doing inference in Rust — candle, burn, ort — and you want to feed a video to a model. Step one is always the same: get the frames. And in Rust today, getting frames means one of two things. Either you shell out to Command::new("ffmpeg"), write PNGs to disk or parse -f rawvideo off a pipe, and read them back; or you reach for the low-level bindings and hand-write the send_packet / receive_frame decode loop — forty lines before the first pixel, and you own the EAGAIN handling and the YUV→RGB conversion yourself. The second path is hard enough that an entire cottage industry of "frame grabber" gists grew up around it: search "rust extract frame from video" and the authoritative answer is frequently someone's gist. A decade on, something this basic still has no comfortable standard answer.
This post is the third path: ez-ffmpeg 0.15's FrameExtractor pulls frames in the same process, in one call, and hands you tightly packed RGB bytes ready for an ndarray view or a tensor. You will get runnable code, a sampling-strategy cheat sheet, and two things that actually earn their keep: why your thumbnails may have been subtly wrong on color this whole time, and how fast this path really is — with numbers you can reproduce.
