Thumbnails?

[neilchaudhuri]

Just curious if anyone had given any thought to thumbnail generation for videos. This would be helpful in supporting video playlists.

Thanks and great work.

[HendrikLouw]

@vidya-code we've been thinking about adding it. Shouldn't be too hard to implement. Let me see what I can do for you.

[HendrikLouw]

I've been looking into this functionality, we will probably want to add a time from where to take a jpeg snapshot, ie

Video.convert( to: :jpeg, time: '00:01:30.00') which will take a snapshot at '00:01:30.00' from the input video. We could also have a default time value for the jpeg converter, that perhaps uses a random time.

I think this might take quite a bit of work we're scheduling this for a 0.3 release, we're currently finishing off 0.2 and once that is launched we can get onto this functionality.

[bittersweet]

You could take look at how Zencoder approaches it with allowing you to specify how many thumbnails you want and it will evenly space them out.

A number of thumbnails to capture. Zencoder will grab evenly-spaced thumbnails across the whole duration of the file. So if you ask for 1 thumbnail, it will be near the middle of the file. Specifying 3 thumbnails on a 8 minute video will result in thumbnails at approximately 2, 4, and 6 minutes.