Add preview thumbnail in video progress bar

[fflorent]

Youtube offers a way to preview the frames when hovering the progress bar. This is very convenient when you want to go directly to a certain moment of a video or to watch it again.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be maintained and convenient plugins for videojs (I saw this one or this another one).

It seems that it is not that difficult. We could use canvas for that: https://jsfiddle.net/epistemex/gdp00x2s/

Also definetely worth to implement it as a plugin.

What do you think?
Florent

[Chocobozzz]

I think it could be suitable in the core PeerTube. I don't think we should use federation for these "progress thumbnails", but a cache as we do with previews.

[ghost]

I found one which is only

• a month old https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-sprite-thumbnails-for-videojs6
• 5 months https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-vtt-thumbnails
• and 6 months https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-sprite-thumbnails

would this count, as being maintained?

[tilllt]

I would really like this feature to be added. There would be non js-alternatives to this, like ffmpeg sampling the video at different times on initial thumbnail selection. The problem with how it is in the stable version right now is that the random thumbnail selection often chooses an image which does not represent the video at all.

[Chocobozzz]

@tilllt See #1322

[davidak]

Timelens is a tool for creating visual timelines. It is used on https://media.ccc.de/.

There are also plugins for JavaScript players: https://timelens.io/plugins/

[SimplyCorbett]

It would be nice to have this implemented.

[Chocobozzz]

Hi,

This feature is planned in our 2023 roadmap: https://joinpeertube.org/news/roadmap-v6
If you want to help to fund this feature, you can make a donation on https://support.joinpeertube.org

[Chocobozzz]

This feature has been implemented in d8f39b1 and 638a295. It will be available in PeerTube 6 planned at the end of the year 🎉

PeerTube will automatically generate the storyboard of uploaded/imported videos and display them in the player progress bar

A script (npm run create-generate-storyboard-job) will be available to generate storyboard of local videos uploaded before PeerTube v6.

[jimaek]

I wonder, could storyboards be adopted for nice fluid previews of videos when hovering over their thumbnails? Similar to youtube. Cause I think static thumbnails are a huge hit to good user experience. Is something like this planned or possible?

[Chocobozzz]

@jimaek Yes I think you're talking about #3142