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
    Animated Progress Bars Using MooTools: dwProgressBar

    I love progress bars. It's important that I know roughly what percentage of a task is complete. I've created a highly customizable MooTools progress bar class that animates to the desired percentage. The Moo-Generated XHTML This DIV structure is extremely simple and can be controlled...

  • By
    Image Reflection with jQuery and MooTools

    One subtle detail that can make a big difference on any web design is the use of image reflections. Using them too often can become obnoxious but using reflections on large, "masthead" images is a classy enhancement. Unfortunately creating image reflections within your...

Discussion

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