The VideoLAN Forums

Hello,

is it possible to add a little preview box like in Youtube to the progess bar of the vlc player? Would be great.



Thanks in advance.

bye

This has been requested earlier, but it isn't possible to implement it without certain drawbacks.

First issue is that choice of full index scan or realtime scan.
With full index the whole file/stream has to be processed before the playback. It would slowdown startup specially with large files and it would be problematic with files that have incorrect timecodes.
With realtime scan issue is the high CPU usage, since VLC would have to decode 2 videos at the same time. This would be specially problematic with HD files that have long I frame delays since decoding one image from random location could take seconds or you would get new preview image from about every tenth second.

Second issue is that this won't work for streams were random access isn't allowed.

Mhm, but in Youtube it's possible and they have HD-Videos and streams, too??

The thumbnails are pregenerated there (full index) so the player just fetches prerendered images.

Ah, I see. What Youtube does with tons of servers as a basis VLC would need to do ad hoc for the video to be played on the machine it's running on. That's a problem

But I believe such talented and sophisticated devs here on the videolan team will find a way to do such a feature in the future

Perhaps this can be an option?
and perhaps custom interval for the preview pictures? like every 1 minute or 10 sec.

Or just pick out the keyframes of avi files etc... can that be done fast?

-ETA

here is some info that migh help you out with it

https://developers.google.com/youtube/a ... TubePlayer

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/

https://developers.google.com/youtube/android/player/

http://apiblog.youtube.com/

So no plugin exist for the thumbnail preview in vlc time toolbar ? It would be really great !

Hi, I really like this idea too!

I am, however, quite a noob, so I don't understand why we could only use prerendered images.
Can't the mini thumbnail behave like a frame of the same (paused) video opened again? So, when I hover on the main video time bar, the second one skips to that same time (maybe only keyframes) and shows an 1:5 mini-frame.
I don't know the memory-cpu load of a double file open with a fast seek, though.
Sorry if this is total bul****t, I'm just trying!

ouh, I also search something like that for VLC and did not thought that it very complicated feature

what if use "indexing during playing" as first step, do "sec preview" only for the video that already played? means only for the past time... something like "partial index", ...
it also good feature
second step, do "realtime scan" only for video codecs that not "very compressed" or something, and not required a lot action (CPU usage) for "get the frame for time" action...
third step, do it for all video codecs, combine "indexing during playing" + "realtime scan", but allow to disable it for slow PC

very naive?

Quite.

I also would like this feature, but understand the challenge for VLC to do this reliably on the fly, on many different platforms. When thinking about workarounds I came up with an idea I haven't seen in the forums. Think of it like .srt subtitle files but for timeline preview thumbnails.

The idea is that the producer of a video generates a mosaic jpg image according to some standard and bundles it with the video. The format could be a sequence of one thumbnail for every 10 seconds in the video, 50x50 pixels in size, in a 10 column wide grid.

When a video is loaded VLC would check the folder for a grid jpg file with the same non extension file name as the video. Then when the user moves the mouse over the timeline VLC uses the timeline position data to extract the matching 50x50 pixel area from the grid image and displays the thumbnail in a popup above the timeline.

This way each client wouldn't have to CPU intensive processing to extract all the thumbnails from the video file. It would only work for videos with the grid image of course. But if the solution catches on people would start uploading grid images for old videos around the internet, just like there are subtitle sites out there already. Other video players could also start making use of the same grid files.

I really like your idea, and i personally DONT think that the idea is naive at all.
Actually VLC like so many other programs out there, can of couurse take advantage of GPU's of video cards that people have bought/added to their system to utilise extra processing power for such purposes.

Jean-Baptise's response was unjustified in my opinion, and was hardly even considered.
If it was considered (even some time before) then you should have recieved a more appropriate response.

Idea liked very much

Would this be feasible with a separate, super-fast keyframe decode built into the decoder? I filed an issue for this in daala and that was suggested as a possibility.

Yes.

You mean to tell me...for over three years this has been requested and debated here???

PotPlayer already has this option; just needs to be configured. Go to: Preferences/Playback, then under Navigation/Progress Bar, simply check "Show thumbnail previews"

YES, it can be done.

how do enable the the youtube preview box because at the moment it just shows the time of where my mouse is if anyone can help i'd really appreciate it

Yes. Indexing could start after opening file, in a separate process, take only set amount of CPU core like 50%. Option to save thumbnail 16x16 grid files on the same directory, so they can be used the next time.

Hi,

I just registered here to bump this request up and see if VideoLAN team could possibly take notice.

Would be great if VLC had this feature.

VLC once had a feature like this. It was short-lived and worked like you see on Youtube, but next update killed the feature. I believe it was hotfixed. The feature showed up about 3-4 years ago.

Zoom Player can do this just great with no problems, so I don't see why VLC couldn't

Anything can be done, but it needs work and there might be other things more urgent or more interesting to do, like performance issues or new UI.

If anybody writes it, it will certainly be merged.

If it was already there, it should not be too much effort to re-add it.
Why was it removed anyway?

If it was already there, it should not be too much effort to re-add it.
Why was it removed anyway?

Posting to agree with this.
VLC is suddenly starting to feel 'old' when YouTube comes up with more innovative features.

YouTube has it easy because they extract the thumbnails ahead of time off-line in the Google cloud. VLC can't do that. As unidan already pointed out, this needs (a lot of) work, and so far nobody has volunteered to do this, especially not in a robust and proper manner. And even then it can never work as well as with cloud streaming, as it would be limited by the user hardware.


Trying to shame the developers is really not helping; it's counter-productive even. And posting "me too" does not help either.