Making generic video thumbnail gallery preview/scrubb/animate "onmouseover"

[oli22]

Anyone know how to make  thumbnails of embeded videos scrub/animate video  "onmouseover" ?

 

This applied directly on thumbnails in gallery to allow  video preview--> not for video time line of video player: videos are embeded from other sites.

 

Know how? know where i can get this snipet of code?

[JonnoTheDev]

This is only possible if you have the video files on your server. What happens is, you upload a video to the server. It then gets converted into swf or HTML5 video format or whatever you require. This is done using the likes of FFMPEG. Now, what this software can also do is take thumbnail images from any point in the video. So if the video was 6 minutes long I may take 5 images from the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th minute. Then I would use image manipulation software such as imagemagick to construct an animated gif from the 5 images taken.

 

So, essentially you need a few bits of software on your server. Look at the commands available for each:

http://www.ffmpeg.org/documentation.html

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-tools.php

 

This cannot be done with videos that are hosted elsewhere.

[oli22]

Thanks for answer, nice of you to communicate.

From what i have seen i think its not true you need to have videos exactly your server.

I have seen many video search engines that animate thumbnails on "mouseover" to help user decide if they  want  to go to a certain site to watch video.

[JonnoTheDev]

From what i have seen i think its not true you need to have videos exactly your server.

I will be surprised if it isn't as the software needs to read the video file to take snaps from certain points in the video timeline.

I have seen many video search engines that animate thumbnails on "mouseover" to help user decide if they  want  to go to a certain site to watch video.

Yes, we do this on some of our video streaming sites where the videos are actually hosted elsewhere. What you must understand is that these videos come via data feeds, also with a series of images. What we are able to do is use the images provided to create an animation. The actual video is played from the remote url.

 

This is a site that does what you are after. You must provide the video file.

http://www.gifninja.com/ConvertVideoToGif.aspx

 

On projects I have worked on that are basically YouTube clones this is a process that is done in the background once a video has been uploaded. If you have ever uploaded a video to YouTube it takes a short while after the video has been uploaded to it being displayed on the site. This is because there are loads of things happening in the background such as, file format conversion, video optimisation, snapshot images being created, video length stored, etc

[oli22]

Well do yo know how gifninja does that?

Isn't it like using the function to take a simple thumbnail picture of a video, but somehow taking that picture at set intervals on the video time line?

[JonnoTheDev]

yes it is done using ffmpeg, read my previous posts the links are there