Kodi Community Forum

This is a way of getting a thumbnail for videos that show a screenshot from the vid. I find it useful for folders of TV shows, where I forget which ep I'm up to if I just leave it as the name foo-s01-e01.avi

You need ffmpeg on your PC, preferably in your path - put the exe in windows\system32 or add its location to your path.

Then open a command prompt, go to the folder containing your vids and do


That goes through all the avi files in the folder and creates a jpeg (actually with a .tbn extension for XBMC) of the frame 5 seconds in, with the same name as the avi. Then set that folder in XBMC to show in thumbs view and you're away!. Alter the number after '-ss' to change how far in you want the grab taken. Change *.avi to be whatever the extension of your vids is.

Not rocket science, but I found it useful and thought I'd share.

Thanks, so simple, so cool.

Nice idea. Here are my embellishments.

You need quotes to deal with filenames with spaces:

And here is one for recursively doing directories:

Has anyone or does anyone know how to do this in linux?

"unable to find a suitable output format for 'videoname.tbn'"

i keep getting this error

any ideas?

Kugai - good stuff, I was just looking around for how to do spaces :-)

gzusrawx - Not off the top of my head. Some kind of find -exec with a bit of awk goodness to do the filename would be my guess.

Bazzio - are you using a current version of ffmpeg? Try changing '.tbn' for 'jpg' or try -singlejpeg instead of -mjpeg

Just wanted to say thanks to you guys for sharing your ideas and tricks.
I just created a page in the online-manual for creating the preview-thumbnails.
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/inde...thumbnails

Please have a look at that page and tell me if i have included any mistakes/typos..

no i dont think i do have the latest.
is is mplayer i need?
I cant seem to find just ffmpeg to put in windows/system32

if you could give me some links or explain this that would be great!
Thanks

ok i got the latest version sorted, but now i have a new error

"swScaler: 0x0 ( is not supported as output format
Cannot get resampling context"

sCAPe - I'm honoured :-) Looks good to me.

Bazzio - I don't know what that error is. Maybe your version is too recent (http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmp...13856.html) - what damn fool told you to use the latest version? ;-) The one I'm using is SVN-r5570, you can try mine if you like (http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~pravda/foo/ffmpeg.exe).
Have you tried it with a few different types of file?

what verison do you have?

aparently pthreadGC2.dll is missing, so i cant use your version
grrrr

ok
finally got it working

Rather than 5 seconds, i wanted to do it with about a min in. Sometimes expecially on movies there is only an intro around 5 secs, so it doesnt make a very good thumbnail.

however this takes a lot more time to process.

Is there a way you can tell it to ignore the file if a tbn is present, this way updates will be a lot quicker

If there is interest I can probably throw together a perl script or something like that to make this a little easier. I'll try to get something up in the next few days.

that would be awesome