(Feature Request) timeline thumbnail

[mostafaasadi]

Hi
It's very good idea , like youtube player or some other players, mpv shows a thumbnail preview on video timeline.
best regards

[Argon-]

IIRC this was already rejected multiple times.
There is one mpv wrapper (/branch) that does this by having 2 instances of mpv, essentially overlaying one instance with the other. Don't remember the name though.

Web players (e.g. youtube) usually offer this because seeking can take quite long. So you want to minimize the amount of seek operations and these previews help you to select the desired position on the first try. However, for an offline player seeks are ridiculously cheap and instantaneous. In fact, having another instance of mpv rendering the small preview all the time is (very) likely to consume more resources than a few targeted seeks.

[darkmorpher]

@wm4 MPC-BE supposedly has that feature

[Hrxn]

MPC-BE indeed has.

Although I don't think that anything comes close to the original implementation on YouTube.

[ghost]

And how is that implemented?

[Hrxn]

On YouTube?

Dark Google Magic, probably.

MPC-BE?

Not really sure, but I'd guess it's here somewhere:

https://sourceforge.net/p/mpcbe/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/apps/mplayerc/PlayerSeekBar.h
https://sourceforge.net/p/mpcbe/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/apps/mplayerc/PlayerSeekBar.cpp
https://sourceforge.net/p/mpcbe/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/apps/mplayerc/PlayerPreView.h
https://sourceforge.net/p/mpcbe/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/apps/mplayerc/PlayerPreView.cpp

Maybe somewhere else in that dir. Didn't read source code, only file names.

[darkmorpher]

Also, QtAV
https://github.com/wang-bin/QtAV/blob/master/widgets/VideoPreviewWidget.cpp

[0xBRM]

Would be cool if it only triggered during a pause.

[otommod]

On YouTube I believe that the thumbnails are actually created when the video is uploaded.

There's also audience, from elementary.

[Hrxn]

Yeah, pretty sure that YouTube uses a special additional track created just for the previews..

[wiiaboo]

It's not really a track, just a thumbnail image map.

[kevmitch]

This is not going to happen in mpv core. @TheAMM has a user script to do this by replacing the osc.

[nvcken]

I tried to setup mpv thumbnail preview script, but doesn't work yet.
TheAMM/mpv_thumbnail_script#61
Have anyone tried it? Pls help