Preview-Box like in Youtube

[fuzziekiwi]

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.

If there was enough public support or donations, is this a thing that could be added? I would love to donate for a feature like this

[Jetro]

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.

Thank you.

[jd342]

Hey, just for information, could somebody confirm whether for the moment there is no work put on track for this feature?

On Reddit, /u/univielcidan posted that this feature is on plan for version 4, but I couldn't find any other source that supports this claim.

Currently unsupported but planned for 4.0 (whole new indexing + thumbnailing engine)

— /u/univielcidan, Jun 23 2019, comment on How do I get VLC to show me a frame just above the seekbar like this? That way I know what's happening at a location without actually having to go to that point., r/VLC, Reddit

The latest direct mention from the developers that I managed to dig up is from 3 years ago in their issue tracker, ticket #1251.

This is a very frequently requested feature, maybe we can reconsider if we can add it at some point in the future? Would certainly help for #35
(If this is still something that will never happen, feel free to close again)

— ePirat, 2 Feb 2018, comment:9, Ticket 1251, Trac, VLC

[coquiss01]

@Remi Denis-Courmont / VLC Team, thank you so much for your great work with VLC. Given the technical difficulties/complexities that exist to show Preview thumbnails in the seekbar using video frames from the video itself, could you please be able to consider giving VLC users the ability to simply link an image to serve as the source of thumbnails to the seekbar? The image would just be the sequence of thumbnails from the video (like youtube does).

The user would be responsible for pre-generating the Image containing the thumbnail sequence image using ffmpeg or any other tool the user likes.

Basically, VLC would just need to provide the ability to link the user pre generated image to the video file and inform the users in the vlc wiki/forum about the image naming default, image size, number of thumbnails per row, etc so that the user knows how to pre-generate the thumbnail sequence image (maybe the naming default could be just [VideoFileName].jpg located in the same folder as the video file).

Is there by any chance any oncoming solution planned for VLC 4? Thanks again so much for your great work.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

This has been considered in the past that the thumbnails could be embedded or external meta-data. But it needs to be implemented in encoding/authoring software first. There's not much sense for VLC to implement a proprietary mean to extract meta-data that nobody provisions.

To make matters worse, it would be difficult for VLC to even advertise that support. If we did advertise it, it would most definitely be widely misconstrued as automatic thumbnail generation, and cause a flood of support issues as to why existing videos don't have thumbnails.

[coquiss01]

This has been considered in the past that the thumbnails could be embedded or external meta-data. But it needs to be implemented in encoding/authoring software first. There's not much sense for VLC to implement a proprietary mean to extract meta-data that nobody provisions.

To make matters worse, it would be difficult for VLC to even advertise that support. If we did advertise it, it would most definitely be widely misconstrued as automatic thumbnail generation, and cause a flood of support issues as to why existing videos don't have thumbnails.

Ok Remi I understand. If by any chance you could think of any way that we (users) could achieve having Thumbnails showing on mouse hover over the seek bar (even by pre-generating our own images ahead of playback), please let us know in this forum thread. Thank you very much for your prompt response and for the great work that the VideoLAN team does.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

I think you misunderstand. Generating images ahead of playback was never a viable option. It's mostly too slow to be done on the end user system. YouTube does it in their cloud, but that only works because video are centrally uploaded to YouTube. For private videos, this needs to be done by the encoder software.

The way this could have happened a decade ago is that popular open-source encoders would have agreed how to store the thumbnails in MKV. Now it's frankly a little late.

[coquiss01]

I think you misunderstand. Generating images ahead of playback was never a viable option. It's mostly too slow to be done on the end user system. YouTube does it in their cloud, but that only works because video are centrally uploaded to YouTube. For private videos, this needs to be done by the encoder software.

The way this could have happened a decade ago is that popular open-source encoders would have agreed how to store the thumbnails in MKV. Now it's frankly a little late.

Thank you very much Remy for your clarification. I understand your scenario much better now with your message quoted above. It makes a lot of sense as why you say that it is a "little late now" for the strategy you explain to be viable today.

You have also very good point when noting that "Generating images ahead of playback was never a viable option. It's mostly too slow to be done on the end user system".

I guess on my end, what I am just trying to say is that it would still be very useful to Generate images ahead of playback on my own end user computer. It is a very slow process. I fully agree with you.

However, at least on my use case (which may or may not match other users use cases), I could perfectly for example leave my computer generating the images for a number of videos during night time for a period of 12 hours, and then have the images ready only the next day. I do not need the images to be generated quickly, and it would still be an amazing feature.

I could use FFMPEG or any other tool, without even VLC having to do the job of generating the images, just VLC providing the user any way to link the images, once the images have been fully generated by any external tool. (I noticed that VLC already has the ability of generating thumbnails, but as of now only at the current point of playback).

Thank you very much again for your great advise and time on this discussion. Very highly appreciated. My apologies if I'm still misunderstanding your information.

[mederi]

How the seeking in a media file works? Usually if I click a time slider, the playback jumps almost instantly there. Of course it depends on a source format and decoding power (hardware). A parallel process could decode just the nearest key frame on the position of mouse cursor over the timeline. If a media source is non-seekable or the frame cannot be decoded in a reasonable time or some other conditions, then the process should just stop and display no preview image there. I think it really could work for local files, for common formats (like h264 with typical GOP size max 250 frames) and it really should work dinamically without pregenerated images.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Generating the thumbnails involves (re)opening and parsing the file separately, and seeking at intervals to decode one picture. And then it also needs to scaled down.

Unlike seeking, you can't reuse the existing demuxer and decoder. Also user-acceptable latency is much lower for going over the slider than for actual seeking, I think.

[pooya72]

can't vlc offer this as an option in preferences and set the default behavior based on available resources on device ?
it does not need to be a moment by moment preview. a tiny snapshot for each 5 seconds can do the trick.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

can't vlc offer this as an option in preferences and set the default behavior based on available resources on device ?

Actually, no. There are no ways to give absolute priority to the playback and other apps, over the preview box generation, especially for I/O. It's all but guaranteed to cause performance problems on most computers and devices.

it does not need to be a moment by moment preview. a tiny snapshot for each 5 seconds can do the trick.

Yes, but realistically, you typically need those snapshots straight on, not 2 hours after the playback started...

[bernie22]

Hello,
but how this feature can be impossible to add to VLC when it works fine in MPC-HC? If MPC-HC can have such feature, so it must be possible, so why is not possible for VLC I don't understand?

[Shaba]

Hi, I've periodically checked this thread for the past few years and decided to make an account today so I could post myself

I've read thru all the posts/replies in the thread and understand the challenges presented with this feature and I've also noticed some other users referring to other media players offering this feature & i don't mean to beat a dead horse - but I was genuinely curious if there was any realistic possibility of this feature now, in present day - with the advances made in technology to-date?

The reason I'm curious is because I found PotPlayer around 6 months ago and later discovered it has the thumbnail previews on nav bar feature (it's disabled by default, but easily enabled in the settings menu) and while I understand how this function might be resource intensive on a users system, (i noticed there's several options in PotPlayer that I assume help make this feature more feasible, such as "Load previous/next files in play folder" "Open a file using worker thread" "Process priority: Above Normal (Recommended)" "Multi-threaded conversion" "Multi-threaded video processing")

I didn't discover this feature in PotPlayer until after I had upgraded my motherboard/cpu to the latest generation of intel cpu's (currently have a i5 12600kf on an Asus Z690 mobo) but I know that the architecture of the 12th gen cpu's from intel is different in design than previous generations and has a lot more cores available as a result (performance cores + efficient cores) I'm not entirely sure how relevant this is to the challenges at hand for implementing such a feature, but after experiencing how simple and smooth the feature seems to work with PotPlayer, I just couldn't help but wonder if there was a possibility of the feature being made a reality now, with modern day hardware/software?

best regards :)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

If history is any indication, nobody volunteered to implement this in the past ten years, so nobody will step up in the future either. Back then, it was advised to those interested, to standardise embedded thumbnails in Matroska. By now, many videos would use it and all major players would show the timeline thumbnails.

Generating the thumbnails dynamically is much more complicated, and would have to be a disabled-by-default option, which seriously limits its usability and the motivation to implement it, I guess.

Having said that, I can't read other people's mind. In a community open-source project, nobody knows if/when somebody will implement a feature until it's implemented.

[Shaba]

If history is any indication, nobody volunteered to implement this in the past ten years, so nobody will step up in the future either. Back then, it was advised to those interested, to standardise embedded thumbnails in Matroska. By now, many videos would use it and all major players would show the timeline thumbnails.

Generating the thumbnails dynamically is much more complicated, and would have to be a disabled-by-default option, which seriously limits its usability and the motivation to implement it, I guess.

Having said that, I can't read other people's mind. In a community open-source project, nobody knows if/when somebody will implement a feature until it's implemented.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I wish I knew anything about how this stuff works or where to even begin learning about it - otherwise I might take interest in the endeavor lol :D

Thanks for the quick response, happy easter

[VKDude]

If history is any indication, nobody volunteered to implement this in the past ten years, so nobody will step up in the future either. Back then, it was advised to those interested, to standardise embedded thumbnails in Matroska. By now, many videos would use it and all major players would show the timeline thumbnails.

Generating the thumbnails dynamically is much more complicated, and would have to be a disabled-by-default option, which seriously limits its usability and the motivation to implement it, I guess.

Having said that, I can't read other people's mind. In a community open-source project, nobody knows if/when somebody will implement a feature until it's implemented.

I found an open source media player, which offers this feature. MPC-BE
Can you pls take a look and implement it if possible? I would really love to see this feature in VLC.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Patches are welcome.

[chemicalelement]

Daum PotPlayer is able to do this somehow. Can we please look into this once?