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 Countdown Plugin

    You've probably been to sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload that allow you to download files but make you wait a specified number of seconds before giving you the download link. I've created a similar script but my script allows you to animate the CSS font-size...

  • By
    Implement the Google AJAX Search API

    Let's be honest...WordPress' search functionality isn't great. Let's be more honest...no search functionality is better than Google's. Luckily for us, Google provides an awesome method by which we can use their search for our own site: the Google AJAX Search API.

Discussion

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