Open-source tool fix ensures video keyframes carry accurate timestamps for LLM pipelines

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A user filing a bug report on the open-source video tool 'crv' revealed that extracted keyframes were stripped of timestamp data before being passed to a large language model. In a 22-minute lecture, 1,377 candidate frames were reduced to 60, but none carried information about when they appeared in the video, making it impossible to cite or verify visual evidence. The developer traced the problem to a multi-stage pipeline — extraction, deduplication, thinning, and renaming — where positional data was lost at each step. The fix uses ffmpeg's built-in showinfo filter to capture true presentation timestamps at extraction and carries them through every stage into a companion frames.json file. The developer chose to emit no timestamp rather than an approximate one, reasoning that a confidently wrong timestamp is more harmful than an absent one in any LLM verification workflow.

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