Thumbnails of videos

[evilaro]

Hi all:

I am trying to help a friend to organize his videos.
He sent me a few of them .AVI from a FUJI F30

In my aplication it came up its thumbnail 160 x 120 pixels...
Then I looked at other SAME format .AVI and I did not even get the
thumbnail... Tried .MOV and same result (I mean with my aplication)

Since I really do not know anything on videos I would like
to ask for some help.

1) I feel this 160 x 120 is very very small quality considering the big size of the video
2) Do videos have different sizes of thumbnails?
3) Is there a simple instruction for windows (using exiftool) to extract the best quality thumbnail of
    any video regardless of the format, or you have to specify the format
    to get the tumbnail.

Any direction to all the help the exiftool has will be appreciated.

Thanks

Emilio

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Emilio,

Video formats are all over the place when it comes to metadata storage.

Some videos contain a larger PreviewImage, and some contain no thumbnail at all.

Looking at my collection of videos here, I see the following:

ThumbnailImage
PreviewImage
OtherImage
Preview PICT
CoverArt

Extracting the largest of these could be done in a similar way to the BigImage Composite tag in the sample config file.

- Phil

[evilaro]

Phil:

Thanks for the lead.

I have tried this
run exiftool -thumbnailimage -b -w .jpg "E:\videos_avi"

And it creates all the thumbnails of the images that are on the  "E:\videos_avi"    //so OK

Then I have tried

ThumbnailImage
PreviewImage
OtherImage
CoverArt

Bu I do not get anything.

Then I tried several .MOV
with my Canon G12 camera
NOTHING

Then I try with some .MP4
Nothing.


So... I feel I am not doing it properly...

How can I get the thumbnails of .mp4 and .MOV
if they exist... if they dont...
would be possible to know it???

Also if that simplifies it, I need file by file, no need of a whole directory

something like

run exiftool -thumbnailimage -b -w    myvideo.mov   > myvideo.jpg

Thanks for the help.

Emilio

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Emilio,

The way I see all of the embedded images is:

exiftool FILE | grep Binary

...but this only works if you have the "grep" utility.

The point is, the embedded images will show up with the string "Binary data..." in the normal ExifTool output if it is able to extract them.

Like I said, some movies don't have them.

- Phil

[evilaro]

Phil:

Really this is so complicated

I looked at Grep but I would get lost.

It is very surprising that a video file that has at least 24 or more high definition
images ... PER SECOND... I can not get a small one... the easiest one ... the first one...

Really it is not possible to get the first image of a video file? if there is no thumbnail.

Thanks

Emilio

Hi Emilio,

The way I see all of the embedded images is:

exiftool FILE | grep Binary

...but this only works if you have the "grep" utility.

The point is, the embedded images will show up with the string "Binary data..." in the normal ExifTool output if it is able to extract them.

Like I said, some movies don't have them.

- Phil

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Emilio,

Sure, you can extract the first frame of the video.  But you will have to use some utility other than ExifTool to do this.

- Phil

[pedroparamo]

You could use something like ffmpeg to extract thumnails from the video but that is going to be somewhat time consuming.  I think Phil's idea using grep to see if there exist thumbs already is probably the best way to go.

[evilaro]

pedroparamo:
I am trying to find a solution of obtaining a thumbnail or frame of some of the Videos that
do not have one.

Looks like Grep is the solution... but really I do not know even how to
start with it.

Emilio

You could use something like ffmpeg to extract thumnails from the video but that is going to be somewhat time consuming.  I think Phil's idea using grep to see if there exist thumbs already is probably the best way to go.