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
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element

    We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards...

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

Discussion

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