Is there a kde dolphin thumbnail creator for video files that would use built-in thumbnails?

There are some video thumbnailers for Dolphin: kffmpegthumbnailer, ffmpegthumbnailer, etc. However, all of them just extract random frame from the video even if there is a built-in thumbnail in video file. Nautilus, for instance, prefers built-in thumbnails and only if these are missing it extracts some frame.

Is there a similar solution for Dolphin?

2 Answers

KDE thumbnail creator with an option to use built-in thumbnails

A KDE bug/wish: Bug 238909 - Enabling of embedded mkv /mka cover art to display as icon -

Meanwhile: A KDE thumb creator plugin with an option to use the external pictures as thumbnails: . The external is at this same as attached/embedded thumbnail.

Both the MPEG-4 container and the Matroska container could have cover art as attachments.

The FFMpegThumbs-MattePaint is capable to use the embedded/attached mp4/Matroska cover art as the thumbnail. The thumbnailer is using AtomicParsley /1/ command-line tool (mp4) and Matroska /2/ command-line tools (mkv) to extract the cover art and use it as the thumbnail. Both tools are available from the Ubuntu repositories.

As default the FFMpegThumbs-MattePaint, 0.42 or later, is using the attched/embedded mp4/Matroska cover art for the thumbnail. If there is no attached picture or the picture extraction is not possible (missing tool etc) then the thumbnail creator will pick a random frame from the media.

A YouTube clip

The user has an option to override the default by writing an empty, 0 byte, file to the ../ffmpegthumbs-mattepaint/NoAuto.

KDE4:

This can be done by the command:

touch ~/.kde/share/apps/ffmpegthumbs-mattepaint/NoAuto

KF5:

This can be done by the command:

touch ~/.config/ffmpegthumbs-mattepaint/NoAuto

If there is more than one picture file attached the user has an option to hand pick the wanted cover.

Thumbnail picking from the Matroska cover art sample file:

Links

There was some activity in kffmpegthumbnailer repository and it is now supports creating thumbnails from embedded covers. So it seems to be quite good solution for this problem. I've been using it for quite some time now, and it fulfills the task perfectly.