The problem#
My Android phone's camera app has an option to take a
"motion photo", which, similar to the iOS
"live photo" feature, records a short, silent video along
with the photo. When viewing the photos on the phone, there's an option
to play the video. But image viewer programs on my computer like
Eye of GNOME (eog) do not support playing them.
The solution#
ExifTool (in Debian, the package name is
libimage-exiftool-perl) can extract the video to a file
using this example from a forum post:
exiftool -b -EmbeddedVideoFile photo.jpg > photo_motion.mp4
You can also play it directly without saving it to a file by piping to VLC:
exiftool -b -EmbeddedVideoFile photo.jpg | vlc -