Video Contact Sheet *NIX or VCS for short is an open source and freely distributed command-line software, a Bash script that has been designed from the offset to allow users to easily and quickly create contact sheets (also known as previews) of a video file.

The software is engineered in such a way that it will take still captures of the selected video file at specific intervals of time. Beside the still images, the output will also include useful information about the respective video file.

The video information displayed on the contact sheets may include the size of the video file, the actual video resolution, the codecs used to encode the file, the frame rate, as well as the total length of the video file.

Being backed by the powerful FFmpeg and MPlayer software projects, Video Contact Sheet *NIX will support almost any video file type, or at least all the video file types that are supported by FFmpeg and MPlayer.

Video Contact Sheet *NIX requires no installation, therefore all you have to do in order to get started with it, is to download the latest release from Softpedia or its official website (see the homepage link at the end of the review), save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it, open a terminal emulator, navigate to your Home dir (e.g. cd /home/softpedia) and run ‘./vcs-1.13.2’ command (this will change when the software will be updated).

Video Contact Sheet *NIX is a cross-platform software. It doesn’t work only on GNU/Linux operating systems, but as well as on BSD distributions, as well as other POSIX operating systems.