imageexifexiftool

How to extract the Photo/Video component of a MVIMG?


The Google Pixel 2 and probably other phones since have the capability to cover "Motion Photos". These are saved as MVIMG and comparatively big.

I’m looking for a way to remove/extract the video.

So far I found a promising exif tag

$ exiftool -xmp:all MVIMG_123.jpg
XMP Toolkit                     : Adobe XMP Core 5.1.0-jc003
Micro Video                     : 1
Micro Video Version             : 1
Micro Video Offset              : 4032524

I thought the video might be present at the specified offset, but this doesn’t work:

$ dd if=MVIMG_123.jpg of=video.mp4 bs=4032524 skip=1
$ file video.mp4
video.mp4: data

Are there any resources that document the embedding? Are there even any tools to remove/extract the video?


Solution

  • I did find https://github.com/cliveontoast/GoMoPho which scans for the mp4 header and then dumps the video.

    We can do the same, scanning for ftypmp4 from the MP4 header (actual file starts 4 bytes earlier):

    Thus to extract videos:

    for i in MVIMG*.jpg; do \
      ofs=$(grep -F --byte-offset --only-matching --text ftypmp4 "$i"); \
      ofs=${ofs%:*}; \
      [[ $ofs ]] && dd "if=$i" "of=${i%.jpg}.mp4" bs=$((ofs-4)) skip=1; \
    done
    

    And to remove videos:

    for i in MVIMG*.jpg; do \
      ofs=$(grep -F --byte-offset --only-matching --text ftypmp4 "$i"); \
      ofs=${ofs%:*}; \
      [[ $ofs ]] && truncate -s $((ofs-4)) "$i"; \
    done