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

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake

    Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...

  • By
    Create a Simple News Scroller Using MooTools, Part I:  The Basics

    News scroller have been around forever on the internet. Why? Because they're usually classy and effective. Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a simple scroller and making it into a flexible, portable class. We have to crawl before we...

Discussion

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