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Video Stories and video blocks don't have a thumbnail image in previews #13809
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Thank you for the report @pollyplummer! I tested the steps you provided and found that the thumbnail works for me if I view it in a browser but the video thumbnail does not work if I view the post in a Preview or a Webview (via View Site), as mentioned on the original report. 👍 Steps to reproduce:
Also:
Result: video thumbnails for story and blog posts do not show up in Previews or Webviews. Story post:
Tested with WPAndroid 16.5-rc-2 on Pixel 3 Android 11. Blog post with a video block:
Tested with WPAndroid 16.5-rc-2 on Pixel 3 Android 11. |
@planarvoid is it too late to include this in the Media Picker Consolidation project by chance? I know it's a stretch… 🤔 but thought I would ask just in case! |
Decided to add this to the list of issues to consider for Groundskeeping (our maintenance rotations) starting Feb 8 and targeting v16.8. |
@designsimply the media picker consolidation project's current phase is done and this is something not related to it anyway (it's not in the media picker). I'd probably consider it as part of the Stories project? It's either stories or gutenberg but I guess Groundskeeping is fine 👍 |
Thanks! This may also be a duplicate of #13589. After seeing that issue, I think this one may be more appropriate for Groundskeeping and I'll try to circle back to check on it in our next few rotations. |
This should be a little bit improved once this PR lands in WP.com and Jetpack: Automattic/jetpack#19176. (I was fixing a separate, video loading indicator issue for the block and realized it may have an effect on this issue.) Only for stories, and only when VideoPress is enabled, the preview should show correctly in the in-app preview (once the PR has landed). This was done by setting the In other cases I'm not sure what could be done since it seems like the WebView doesn't preload videos by default, and we don't have a poster available for non-VideoPress videos. Perhaps there's a setting we can choose to tweak in the in-app WebView for this. Then improving the preview in Gutenberg would be a separate issue, I don't have any insight into that one. |
I've only managed to scratch the surface on this one and wondered if we haven't tried this before, maybe we could try the suggestion in this [SO comment]( |
I gave the
Given the above, and that all of this can only apply to the story block and not the video block (since that one is in core and we can't easily modify its behavior), I still recommend that we look for a solution in the WebView configuration itself rather than changing the block rendering. This would have the added benefit of solving the problem for video blocks too - and essentially makes this issue a duplicate of #13589 as Sheri thought. Note also that all of this only affects Stories on non-VideoPress Jetpack sites, since VideoPress is always used for videos uploaded to WordPress.com. So it doesn't have the impact is seems to on the surface, since the poster attribute change was made. I did, however, suggest to @mzorz that he take a look at whether we can improve the Story block in mobile Gutenberg to respect the poster attribute when that's set. This would mirror the change I made that fixed the preview for webviews, and would mean that video previews work correctly for story blocks throughout the app as long as VideoPress is enabled. |
ah, even if it worked, this is a bummer and must be overcomplicating things. We'd have to check where the URL gets replaced (API perhaps?)
Agreed, this was a known side behavior with the hack (it's actually a hack after all)
👎
Yeah as far as I understand some of the video needs to be downloaded so then the browser can take a frame and present it as a poster. How it calculates how much of it needs to be downloaded is unknown to me but agreed that indicating a timestamp as opposed to a frame reference would likely make the codec need more frames to decode and extract 1 frame at the actual given timestamp. But then this is also important, from this link:
So basically in the case of self-hosted sites with jetpack this would be yet another hurdle to overcome (and not sure everyone can set this up, given many self-hosted WordPress sites are being hosted on shared servers)
Agreed. Tried to look for some documentation backing this up myself
and
It definitely is up to the implementation to deal with different sources (video files) and come up with the best solution for the requested timestamp, so the output may end up varying and having different results being experienced for different users.
This makes a lot of sense. 👍
Will look into that next week 👍 |
Note that I edited the last comment to include the reference to the media fragments HTML5 spec. |
I was still able to reproduce this in WP Android 20.4-rc-2, on a Samsung Galaxy S21. |
Expected behavior
I would expect that the Video story posts would have a thumbnail shown in the post, like the image stories, but it looks like it just has a placeholder image. I created the story by uploading 1 video and publishing it without any changes. See attached image.
![Screenshot_20210118-155626](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/343280/104967620-6d1e9d00-59a9-11eb-8b7a-0bf760693039.png)
This was tested on WordPress for Android version 16.5-RC-1, Pixel 3 phone, Android version 11.
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