Create a Thumbnail From a Video with ffmpeg

By  on  

Creating a thumbnail to represent a video is a frequent task when presenting media on a website. I previously created a shell script to create a preview video from a larger video, much like many adult sites provide. Let's view how we can create a preview thumbnail from a video!

Developers can use `ffmpeg, an incredible open source media utility, to create a thumbnail. To create a thumbnail from the first frame of a video, execute the following command:

ffmpeg -i input.webm -vf "select=eq(n\,34)" -vframes 1 thumbnail.png

Providing a video thumbnail is a great tool convert images into video views. You don't need fancy software and manual labor to create thumbnails -- use ffmpeg!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    QuickBoxes for Dojo

    Adding to my mental portfolio is important to me. First came MooTools, then jQuery, and now Dojo. I speak often with Peter Higgins of Dojo fame and decided it was time to step into his world. I chose a simple but useful plugin...

  • By
    Printing MooTools Accordion Items

    Sometimes we're presented with unforeseen problems when it comes to our JavaScript effects. In this case, I'm talking about printing jQuery and MooTools accordions. Each "closed" accordion content element has its height set to 0 which means it will be hidden when the...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!