What is a movie barcode? How a whole film fits in one image

A movie barcode is a whole film turned into one image. The frames are squashed into thin vertical stripes, and the stripes sit side by side in the order they play. The result looks like a colorful barcode that runs from the first scene on the left to the credits on the right.

The colors show the look of the film over time. A night chase becomes a dark band, a beach scene becomes a bright one, and a film with a strong color grade turns into one long wash of the same tones.

How a movie barcode is made

A film is a long row of still frames, usually 24 a second. A two hour film has well over a hundred thousand of them. A movie barcode keeps that row and throws away almost everything else.

1. Take the frames. Use all of them for a short clip, or one frame a second for a full film.
2. Squash the frames to one pixel wide. The colors across a frame blend into a single column.
3. Line the columns up from left to right, in playing order.
4. Stretch the result to the size you want to show or print.

There are two common styles. The squashed style keeps the top to bottom detail of a frame, so you can still see a horizon line or a bright window. The averaged style turns a frame into a single color, which gives clean, flat bands that are easier to compare.

Where movie barcodes came from

Movie barcodes took off in March 2011, when a Tumblr called moviebarcode started posting them. FlowingData, a data visualization blog, wrote about it on March 7, 2011, and other design blogs followed within a week.

The idea had older roots in art. Readers in that FlowingData post's comments pointed to earlier work by the artist Jason Salavon, who had made art from whole films years before. The moviebarcode Tumblr is still online, with an index of its barcodes and a prints page, though its last post is from 2018.

How to make a movie barcode with FFmpeg

You can make a movie barcode on your own computer with FFmpeg, a free command line tool for video. We ran these commands on our 16 second Upstream.so intro, which has 488 frames. First, count the frames:

ffprobe -v error -count_frames -select_streams v:0 \
  -show_entries stream=nb_read_frames -of csv=p=0 intro.mp4

Then make the squashed barcode. This squeezes the frames to 1 pixel wide and 540 tall, and lines up all 488 of them in one row:

ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -vf "scale=1:540:flags=area,tile=488x1" \
  -frames:v 1 barcode.png

For the averaged style, shrink the frames to a single pixel, then stretch the row so you can see it:

ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -vf "scale=1:1:flags=area,tile=488x1" -frames:v 1 colors.png
ffmpeg -i colors.png -vf "scale=1600:540:flags=neighbor" colors-wide.png

The area option averages the pixels as it shrinks, so a stripe is the real average color of its frame. The tile filter places the frames next to each other. Both are described in the FFmpeg filter docs.

For a feature film, add fps=1 at the start of the filter so FFmpeg keeps one frame a second, and set the tile width to the film's length in seconds. We tested this on a 93 second clip with fps=1,scale=1:540:flags=area,tile=93x1. If the tile is wider than the number of frames, FFmpeg leaves the rest of the image empty, so round the length down.

How to read a movie barcode

Once you know what to look for, a barcode shows how a film was cut and lit. In our intro, the edit jumps between three looks with three different colors. A feature film works the same way over two hours.

• Long dark stretches usually mean night scenes or dim rooms.
• A sudden bright band is often a cut to daylight or a white room.
• Thin stripes that flicker between colors show fast cutting, like a chase or a fight.
• A barcode that stays in one color family for most of its length points to a strong color grade.

Those patterns also make barcodes fun to guess. A film's colors are part of how people remember it, so a fan can sometimes name a film from its barcode alone.

Turning a movie barcode into a game

Movie Barcode is one of the first games in the StreamArena lineup. The stream shows a film's barcode, and players name the film. In OBS, viewers and guests answer on their phones. When you stream through Upstream.so, chat can also type answers from YouTube, Twitch and Kick, and everyone lands on one scoreboard. Guest answers stay hidden until the reveal. Our Movie Barcode page shows a full round. The guests section shows how they join.

A few things make a barcode round better, whichever way you play it:

• Pick films most of your audience has seen, since the barcode is already a hard clue.
• Mix decades, so the round isn't only this year's films.
• Choose films with a clear color identity. A film with one famous color is easier than a gray drama.
• If nobody gets it after a while, give a hint out loud, like the year or the lead actor's first name.

To run it on stream, add the game link to OBS or another streaming app, or pick it as a scene in Upstream.so. The how it works section has the three steps.

Questions