[Videos] Thumbnail generation (1 Viewer)

[kiwijunglist]

Hi @Paranoid Delusion @infinite.loop

Does MP still use mtn.exe / movie thumbnailer?

I find MP fails to create thumbnails for approximately half of my h264 .ts tv recordings.
mtn was last updated in 2008 so it uses ffmpeg based on 2008 version (The project was abadoned)

However the source files are still on source forge, and I wonder if it was recompiled with the latest version of ffmpeg it would run a lot better?

http://moviethumbnail.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/moviethumbnail/

There is also this:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3470571&group_id=201133&atid=976337
(but i think it is for Linux)

 

[infinite.loop]

Yes mp still uses mtn. There was a discussion to replace it with an other tool, but that fails even more often. We could simply use the windows internal thumb generator, but this means droping winxp support and we need an developer willing to code that. This is more work than it sounds because the windows system only provides one thumb, so without further changes this would mean a reduced functionality.

 

[kiwijunglist]

Yeah I just found a discussion about it here, as well as some patches @pilehave
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/recording-thumbnails-resolved-d.98024/

It would be quite easy to just use ffmpeg to grab 4 images and then use a command line tool like imagemagick to combine the 4 images into a single thumbnail image. You just need to find the video file length (time) and then use

ffmpeg.exe -i [videofilename.ts] – ss [videolengthoftime/6] – t [totalvideolengthoftime/6] -f image2 – sameq -vcodec mjpeg thumb-%03d.jpg

then you use imagemagick to combine the 4 images into one (can't remember the command needed)

Alternatively you could use this
http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegthumbnailer/wiki/FFMpegThumbnailer
but I think it is probably faster to directly invoke ffmpeg

 

[kiwijunglist]

I've looked into this a bit further

I would be able to code a replacement for mtn.exe using ffmpeg to grab screenshots and an imagemagick script (open source, freeware) to combine the screenshots into a final thumbnail.

Advantages
Works with h264 because I would use latest ffmpeg build

I could add the option to superimpose the tv channel image from the \thumbs\tv\logos folder into the corner of the thumbnail
I could add the option to have the date written into the image

I could add the option to have the show name written onto the image

With a Little help from others
Could probably have the option to look up the recordded show name on thetvdb, if exists use the fanart image to create the thumbnail

Could probably have the option to look up the recorded show name on thetvdb, if exists use the fanart image and banner image to create a thumbnail

Could probably have the option if the tv recording has season + episode + showname information, then look up the tvdb and grab the episode image from there and use that

Disadvantage
mtn has several features such as discarding a frame if it is blurry / too dark, I don't know how to code for this.


I definitely wouldn't be able to code any of this into an actual patch, but I could present it as a simple script / set of commands or .bat file that could be easily incorporated by someone that wanted to patch the changes into mediaportal. Imagemagick commandline tool gives the abliity to combine images, alter images and add text to images, I used it to write a script that makes custom disc images for the dvdart plugin so pretty sure I could do this as well.

 

[kiwijunglist]

I'll work on adding some of the above features into my tv thumbnailer script/plugin and if it is successful someone can consider if it would be worth swaping out mtn.exe for ffmpeg and imagemagick. https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...tom-rec-tv-thumbs-better-h264-support.113415/

I've also tried to contact the mtn.exe author to see if he would consider one last update of mtn.exe to incorporate a newer version of ffmpeg.

 

[kiwijunglist]

So I played around with adding channel logos and text onto the thumbnails, but in the GUI it looks bad, so I think it is kind of pointless.

Jay_UK has made an mtn.exe replacement that uses ffmpeg and the montage command from imagemagick to create a thumbnail, it get's behind mtn's problem of not being able to handle some h264 recordings. It's kind of a hack because it just mimics the input arguments that were given by MP to the original mtn.exe and creates the thumbnail that way.

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...better-h264-support.113415/page-3#post-927456

also it currently doesn't have any smart logic like the original mtn had.
eg. discarding blurry / dark frames. also it grabs screen shots at a set time frame of 720+20seconds per additional screenshot requested in mp config, so can fail on shorter recordings (i think mtn used percentage base markers to decide where to stop).

With regards to using the recording's show name (+/- episode details) to look for online images, that is miles beyond what I can do, so I guess this is as far as the solution gets for now.