A simple video thumbnailer that uses mpv, primarily intended to be used by a file browser. If you use mpv as your video player and are happy with its playback, you'll likely be happy with mpv-thumbnailer's thumbnails. File format support should be good and aspect ratio errors rare.
mpv-thumbnailer generates multiple thumbnails per file and selects the largest of those files, thus hopefully avoiding the common problem of thumbnailing boring all-black frames. As a downside, this means that mpv-thumbnailer is somewhat slow.
mpv-thumbnailer includes and installs a thumbnailer definition file that works with GNOME's Nautilus. Support for other platforms or file browsers should be easy to add.
Usage: mpv-thumbnailer VIDEO THUMBNAIL SIZE
VIDEO is the input video file to generate a thumbnail from.
THUMBNAIL is the output image file to write.
SIZE is the pixel width/height of the thumbnail image.
To install, run
make
make PREFIX=/usr/local installFor the make step you need the Rust compiler rustc.
Since version 3.26 GNOME runs thumbnailers sandboxed via Bubblewrap. Any changes should be tested to adhere to those sandbox rules, which currently seem to only be documented in the below bug report.