Return Status while cap.isOpened() at command line

I read an mp4 video with Python 3.6.5 and OpenCV 3.4.1 and do some (resource-heavy) calculations with every single frame.

I have the total number for frames (length) and the current one (count) of course, so I’d like to give a progress update in my command line, but unfortunately it shows everything only after the whole process is finished.

while cap.isOpened():
    ret, frame = cap.read()

    if ret:
        # Calculation stuff
        ...

        # Print the current status
        print("Frame %s/%s" % (count, length))

        count = count + 1

Unfortunately it only prints ALL after the video file is completely processed. How can I print a “live” status of the current frame?

I use MINGW64 (Windows) as my Console

Answer

At the first look, this is due to the fact that you probably have control flow directives in your code (like break, continue, etc.), that prevent the interpreter from reaching the line.

Therefore you should make sure that either you print before these directives, your we can simply print at the top, like:

while cap.isOpened():
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    print("Frame %s/%s" % (count, length))
    count += 1

    if ret:
        # Calculation stuff
        # ...
        pass

That being said, we can turn this capture procedure into a generator that prints the values, with a nice progress bar, like:

from tqdm import tqdm
from cv2 import CAP_PROP_FRAME_COUNT

def frame_iter(capture, description):
    def _itertor():
        while capture.grab():
            yield capture.retrieve()[1]
    return tqdm(
        _iterator(),
        desc=description,
        total=int(capture.get(CAP_PROP_FRAME_COUNT)),
    )

Then we can use it like:

for frame in frame_iter(capture, 'some description'):
    # process the frame
    pass

It will display a progress bar like demonstrated in the GitHub repository of tqdm.