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
    jQuery topLink Plugin

    Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...

  • By
    Create a 3D Panorama Image with A-Frame

    In the five years I've been at Mozilla I've seen some awesome projects.  Some of them very popular, some of them very niche, but none of them has inspired me the way the MozVR team's work with WebVR and A-Frame project have. A-Frame is a community project...

Discussion

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