Generating Video Thumbnails

[philcooling]

I'm still pretty new at this so I hope I haven't wasted my time duplicating functionality which is already in GBPVR!

Anyway, I'm looking at moving over to GBPVR from Snapstream's BeyondTV product and I had a large number of video files I was using in BeyondTV which I wanted to have available in GBPVR's Video Library (the default plugin) but was disappointed when there appeared to be no easy way to generate thumbnails for all the videos automatically (if there is, I'd like to know about it!).

So, after a bit of searching I discovered that FFMPEG can generate JPGs from a wide range of video files so I wrote a little VBScript to do this and I've attached it here for anyone else to look at and use.

The script first finds your CONFIG.XML file and reads out the locations you have defined in the VideoLibrary configuration. It then scans each of the locations in turn, working through all the subdirectories to locate Video files (currently AVI, MPG, MPEG, MOV & WMV) and it then runs FFMPEG to generate a still image from that file which it places in the same folder as the Video (is there a better place to put these???). Finally, it randomly picks one of these files to be the "folder.jpg" - i.e. the image you see before you open the given folder.

The config of the script is straight-forward - in fact if you have used the default install options there is no config needed! Otherwise all you need to do is tell it where to find the CONFIG.XML file and the FFMPEG.exe file.

This has been tested on Windows XP SP3 running GBPVR 1.4.7.

Please reply with any thoughts/comments/questions!

[McBainUK]

there appeared to be no easy way to generate thumbnails for all the videos automatically (if there is, I'd like to know about it!).

I'm sure there's a ctrl-??? command to create a thumbnail at the point you're currently watching. I can't remember what it is though - probably worth a forum/google search.

[martint123]

Some mention here http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...post264023

Control-T looks like it may generate one? (and uses ffmpeg to make it).

[pBS]

yep,but it doesn't scan all your old dirs to make them..you have to be watching it at the time..
you can also put that cmd line in postprocessing to have it snap future shows..

[martint123]

yep,but it doesn't scan all your old dirs to make them..you have to be watching it at the time..
you can also put that cmd line in postprocessing to have it snap future shows..

All I would get would be adverts. At least you get to choose your clip when viewing

[philcooling]

I'm sure there's a ctrl-??? command to create a thumbnail at the point you're currently watching. I can't remember what it is though - probably worth a forum/google search.

I was aware of Ctrl-T but I'm not gonna sit through 100+ videos and manually hit it! I wanted something I could point at my files and forget about!

[mvallevand]

I think the standard now is not to extract your own images, and instead use a consistent naming convention, maybe try tvrename or JavaWiz's tool, and connect online to tvdb to get season and episode images, fanart and metadata.

Martin