My Video Thumbnails

[dman_lfc]

It would be good to get movie covers from other sources if IMDB does not have them.

i.e. Amazon / Walmart.

Or alternatively if a JPG file matches the video file name then this is used.

DMAN

[FullMoon]

Windows explorer actually extracts thumbnail images from mpg files, can we use that in any way?

[Molokoids]

Originally Posted by dman_lfc

Or alternatively if a JPG file matches the video file name then this is used.

Don't know if we are talking about the same thing but if you match a jpg to a video and use the .tbn extension you have a thumbnail for the video.

[NoMoDo]

I will be uploading a patch that does this (Amazon, Buy, Walmart, and Google Picture Search) within the next few days. The nice thing is that it could work for TV Episodes of popular shows through Google Picture Search (you are likely to find quite a few good pictures for every episode of the X-Files,etc...).

My patch, however, only implements the grabbing of picture itself. It is up to someone else to implement it into MP (IE, to write the interface for it), as I simply don't have the time to, being that I'm busy doing other MP stuff.

[FullMoon]

Ok, Windows explorer will makes one large thumbs file per directory, and applies it to jpg, mpg etc. FOr mpg, it takes the first frame and makes that into a thumbnail, and does this automatically. If Media Portal could read these automatically, that woudl be cool.

On the other hand, for pictures, Media Portal automatically will generate thumbnails and store them, it does not have a feature to do this with videos. Most of my videos are home movies I converted and serve off my computer. It would be cool to have a thumbnail generator that a. extracts the first frame into a thumbnail, or b. (preferred) lets you choose which frame to make into a thumbnail, like most DVD compiling programs do.

I have a workaround to make thumbnails and then rename them as tbn files, its intensive but as soon as I can get links to the freeware programs, I will post links/instructions. If anyone else knows a good thumbnail generator/renamer, please post.

[FullMoon]

Ok, my small contribution to the frey.

I use the thumbs program (free version available at
http://www.greggman.com/thumbs/download.htm

This program generates thumbnails in subdirectories of folders which have mpg files. It makes jpg files and changes the name (inserts th_ at the beginning and _mpg at the end.

I then use renamer60 (can be download at http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/Renamer/ )
to fix these name changes by replacing th_ with nothing, and _mpg.jpg with .tbn

Last step is to move the tbn files into the directory the mpg files are in. It did not work if I placed these where video thumbnails should be.

Again, here's hoping for an easier solution