Ask HN: Thumbnail API

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7310710

by matthewarkin • 12 years ago

1 2 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm working on a project where I sometimes need to create thumbnails of a video. After some Googling, it doesn't seem like there is an API that will just give me a thumbnail of a video. The APIs that do exist want to me encode the entire video and as part of the encoding I can get a thumbnail.

Would this sort of API be helpful to anyone else? If so, I'd be happy to work on opening it up. If not, I'll just keep it to myself.

csclark• 12 years ago

We would definitely give it a try - Video Thumbnails can be tricky, as it makes all the difference for a user to view it or not.

For instance, generally the first second of video is blank, though taking a thumbnail at the middle is not necessarily representative.

matthewarkin• 12 years ago

Yea, that is a tricky part. Most of the video encoding services can be configured to take a thumbnail at the beginning, at a user determined point, or every X seconds.

In my use case,I don't necessarily have any reason to have the entire video encoded and it adds an unnecessarily complicated structure.

Currently I just take a thumbnail .1 second in (this also allows me to utilize minimal bandwidth since I don't download the entire video), but it should be fairly easy to add a parameter