Need a Single Thumbnail and am getting two

[dickday]

Greetings.

vlc is running on a Win7-32 PC. The version is VLC media player 2.0.5 Twoflower.

The following is the command line I am using...

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --rate=1 -V dummy --intf=dummy --dummy-quiet --aout="dummy" --video-filter=scene --start-time=15 --stop-time=16 --scene-format=jpg --scene-ratio=24 --scene-path=c:\vlctest\ --scene-prefix=snap c:\vlctest\bobcat.mp4 vlc://quit

My problem is that I only want one thumbnail. The code above is giving me 2 jpg's, snap00001.jpg (which is blank) and snap000025.jpg which has the thumbnail I want.

Questions..
1. How can I get just the one usable thumbnail?
2. Do I really need scene-prefix?
3. Assuming the video is called myvideo1.mp4, can I tell the command line to name the thumbnail myvideo1.jpg?

Thank you for any advice or answers.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

try to increase scene-ratio

[dickday]

I'm pretty sure I tried that but I'll experiment again with that value. Thank you!

[dickday]

The scene-ratio definitely is what is controlling the output. When the original value was 24, the two output files were snap00001.jpg and snap00025.jpg. As I changed the scene-ration value, the file name of the second file was always one higher than the scene-ration setting. If the scene-ratio was set at 32, the output name of the second file was snap00033.jpg.

The number of output files never changed until it got to 36. With scene-ratio set at 36, I only get one output file, snap00001.jpg, but it's the one I don't want, it's blank. The command listed above (with scene-ratio set to anything below 36) generates two jpg's, the first one (snap0001.jpg) is blank, the second one, has a file name that is one digit higher than the scene-ration value and this the one I need.

Any other thoughts? I really appreciate the help!

[dickday]

I find that with scene-ratio values set lower than 24, I get many, many output jpg files.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

And if you increase the start-time with ratio to 36 ?

[dickday]

Once again, thank you.

Increasing the scene-ratio to 30 or higher, does create just one image, but it's a blank one, regardless of how high I make the start value. All it does is take longer to move through the video before it creates the output.

I have seen examples of how to extract a thumbnail by executing vlc command line code. Unfortunately, they have not yet worked, at least for me. All I have changed is the path to the file and the file name. I have now tried this on 3 different Windows computers with identical results.

I found the --image-out-replace parameter that looks like it would solve my problem by outputing just one image but vlc error's out when it sees this parameter. The vlc I am using is VLC media player 2.0.5 Twoflower. Could this be an older version that does not support this feature?

Thanks

[dickday]

I believe I have it figured out. I assumed the start/stop parameters were integers. I tried starting at 0 and ending at .5 and that allowed me to get the one snapshot. I also found out that the fps for all of the videos is 30, so I changed the ratio to match that. Again, thank you for all of your help.