[Goodies-dev] Video thumbnailer

[Erlend Davidson]

Dirk Vanden Boer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I created a thumbnailer for video files. I currently use 
> code.google.com <http://code.google.com/> as a repository for my code.
> You can check out the thumbnailer at 
> http://code.google.com/p/thunarvideothumbnailer/.
>
> The thumbnailer uses ffmpeg for video decoding, so the supported video 
> files depend on the compilation of your ffmpeg library.
> Dependencies of the thumbnailer are: ffmpeg and libpng.
>
> I would like some people to check out the thumbnailer, and let me know 
> if you find some bugs/problems that I'm not aware of.
It seems pretty fast!

I think there are a few bugs - quite often thumbnails look 
1/2-transparent, or with some blocky-parts.  I get some errors:
decodeVideoFrame() failed
PIX_FMT_YUV420P will be used as an intermediate format for rescaling
decodeVideoFrame() failed
decodeVideoFrame() failed
[mpeg1video @ 0xb7eba548]warning: first frame is no keyframe
PIX_FMT_YUV420P will be used as an intermediate format for rescaling

These errors were when thumbnailing the file:
http://www.stack.nl/~crypton/pguin/penguin1.mpg

I'm using ffmpeg version 0.4.9_p20061016 (compiled under gentoo).

It might be an idea to check the thumbnail image for contrast, and if 
this is extremely low generate another one from another frame of the 
video... of course there are performance problems with doing that.
> Then maybe it can be included in the Xfce Goodies Project?
I've been looking for a video thumbnailer for addition to the 
thunar-thumbnailers goodies project 
(http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-thumbnailers).  
Having a lightweight standalone program for video thumbnails seems like 
a good idea for a lightweight file-manager.

Erlend