Video Cut Detection and Analysis Tool

Latest Release: v0.7 (May 3, 2026)

Website: scenedetect.com

Quickstart Example: scenedetect.com/cli/

Documentation: scenedetect.com/docs/

Discord: https://discord.gg/H83HbJngk7

Quick Install:

pip install scenedetect --upgrade

Requires ffmpeg/mkvmerge for video splitting support. Windows builds (MSI installer/portable ZIP) can be found on the download page.

Quick Start (Command Line):

Split input video on each fast cut using ffmpeg:

scenedetect -i video.mp4 split-video

Save some frames from each cut:

scenedetect -i video.mp4 save-images

Skip the first 10 seconds of the input video:

scenedetect -i video.mp4 time -s 10s

More examples can be found throughout the documentation.

Quick Start (Python API):

To get started, there is a high level function in the library that performs content-aware scene detection on a video (try it from a Python prompt):

python
from scenedetect import detect, ContentDetector
scene_list = detect('my_video.mp4', ContentDetector())

scene_list will now be a list containing the start/end times of all scenes found in the video. There also exists a two-pass version AdaptiveDetector which handles fast camera movement better, and ThresholdDetector for handling fade out/fade in events.

Try calling print(scene_list), or iterating over each scene:

python
from scenedetect import detect, ContentDetector
scene_list = detect('my_video.mp4', ContentDetector())
for i, scene in enumerate(scene_list):
    print('    Scene %2d: Start %s / Frame %d, End %s / Frame %d' % (
        i+1,
        scene[0].get_timecode(), scene[0].frame_num,
        scene[1].get_timecode(), scene[1].frame_num,))

We can also split the video into each scene if ffmpeg is installed (mkvmerge is also supported):

python
from scenedetect import detect, ContentDetector, split_video_ffmpeg
scene_list = detect('my_video.mp4', ContentDetector())
split_video_ffmpeg('my_video.mp4', scene_list)

For more advanced usage, the API is highly configurable, and can easily integrate with any pipeline. This includes using different detection algorithms, splitting the input video, and much more. The following example shows how to implement a function similar to the above, but using the scenedetect API:

python
from scenedetect import open_video, SceneManager, split_video_ffmpeg
from scenedetect.detectors import ContentDetector
from scenedetect.video_splitter import split_video_ffmpeg

def split_video_into_scenes(video_path, threshold=27.0):
    # Open our video, create a scene manager, and add a detector.
    video = open_video(video_path)
    scene_manager = SceneManager()
    scene_manager.add_detector(
        ContentDetector(threshold=threshold))
    scene_manager.detect_scenes(video, show_progress=True)
    scene_list = scene_manager.get_scene_list()
    split_video_ffmpeg(video_path, scene_list, show_progress=True)

See the documentation for more examples.

Benchmark:

We evaluate the performance of different detectors in terms of accuracy and processing speed. See the benchmark report for details.

Reference

Documentation (covers application and Python API)
CLI Example
Config File

Help & Contributing

Please submit any bugs/issues or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Before submission, ensure you search through existing issues (both open and closed) to avoid creating duplicate entries.
Pull requests are welcome and encouraged. PySceneDetect is released under the BSD 3-Clause license, and submitted code should be compliant.

For help or other issues, you can join the official PySceneDetect Discord Server, submit an issue/bug report here on Github, or contact me via my website.