735052 - Provide a way to take a thumbnail of a video

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Developer Pages, defect)

Description

[Andy McKay]

Probably the best thing to use is ffmpeg since this is available as rpm on our celery boxes. Whatever is used will have to be added to the celery boxes throughout our infrastructure.

Basically we need to be able to take a video and grab a frame. The frame is then placed in the same place that screenshots exist for an addon. Because this could be intensive, let's make sure it's done in celery and logs what's going on and when an error occurs, which I'm sure it will.

Comment 1

[Andy McKay]

Let's assume just webm for the moment.

Comment 2

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

I think this is usually something like "grab a frame x seconds in and call it good."  No doubt people will be unhappy with that.

Comment 3

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

Extracting an image is listed as an example on this page:
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Video-and-Audio-file-format-conversion

Youtube shows the image half way through. Would that be a decent default?  Vs the :00 which may be black often?

The example also shows grabbing multiple image, e.g. every 10s, which you could then cycle through on hover or something fancy. All iPhoto-ish and all.

Comment 4

[Andy McKay]

Half way through would be great. If we don't do anything it will just grab the first frame anyway. We'll get fancy later, but this will allow us to work seamlessly with the screenshot preview code and get a system in place for when we do more complicated validation and encoding of videos.

Comment 5

[Andy McKay]

https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/commit/bb754bb3eede505844d5d46a8072bd4f1a8a2bf0