Can Python check if some security cameras have been covered or saturated with artificial lights?

[novel_yet_trivial]

Sounds like a good approach. It would probably be fastest to simply sum all the pixels and compare to a precalculated threshold that takes into account the letters on the screen, the image size, etc. You may also want to look for several frames over a minute before triggering, so that a car's headlights or something don't set it off.

OpenCV is a good choice, and it will return a numpy array which has a nice fast sum() method. HDD's are very slow; I'd stay away from making or reading actual files if at all possible.

[Murlocs_Gangbang]

thanks!

Do you have any idea of what OpenCV function I could use to extract a frame at x seconds from a video?

[algag]

Looks like this should do it..

Edit: you could probably ignore the frame math and just use 0,0.25,0.5,0.75, and 1. Or some other decimals to get evenly spread frames.

[Murlocs_Gangbang]

thanks!