heic - 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

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.