How to generate thumbnails for Home Videos

[MarcusJ 18]

For some reason I cannot get emby server to generate thumbnails for my Home Videos (except for one such video - see the first video labeled 1986 Florida Vacation). I have a couple thousand such videos, so having a "poster" for each one would be extremely helpful in locating a specific video clip. I have tried every setting that makes sense in my Home Video "Library" section off the dashboard screen, but still nothing. Here is a screen shot of the blank posters that I am referring to and a couple screen shots of my Home Video Library setup configuration.

To save screen shot space, I only show the fields in which I have made a selection, every other field has been left blank (many are not shown).

Any help would be appreciated.

Edited June 4, 2021 by MarcusJ
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[rbjtech 4324]

By thumnails - do you mean poster images ?  I would put 'Screen Grabber' at the top of the Movie Image fetchers as that will be the only option for home video.

If by thumbnails you mean the images every 30 seconds etc - then have a look in the ..\programdata\cache\thumbnail-failures.txt file - as this contains all the files that emby could not extract the images from and has put in an ignore file.  You can delete this txt file and it will try them again - but many older home video formats don't work with this feature. (I have a few myself).

It's also worth clearing out any .nfo files for this home videos folder (if you use them) and do a metadata refresh (not just a library scan).

If after all of that it still doesn't grab the poster images - then it's probably worth refreshing the log, do a full scan and then post the log here so we can see why this is not working for you.

 

[Carlo 4331]

Let us know how you make out after doing what @rbjtech mentioned.

[Luke 37214]

If the screen grabber is enabled on the library, then try refreshing the metadata on one of those videos and see if it helps add an image. if it doesn't, then please attach the emby server log. thanks.

[MarcusJ 18]

Thank you all!

Refreshing the metadata did the trick!

[Luke 37214]

Thanks for the feedback !

[EmblemJD 17]

Hey @Luke

I have a question regarding this functionality as well (similar to an earlier request brought up here (did not want to necro a 2 year old post though)

I have a number of home videos, where obviously Screen Grabber will be the only option for thumbnails. Any chance we could a bit more control than just "enable/disable"?
Case in point, the fixed value of "take image of first 10% into the video" can create awkward thumbnails like people blinking mid-sentence. What would be great is to have at least a "Create new random thumbnail image" in the menu, which slightly offsets the 10% fixed value. This way it could be a nice compromise for the few videos where the thumbnail is really ridiculous :)

Any possibility to implement that easily or could you maybe hint me at a workaround? Many thanks for the great work on Emby btw!

[Luke 37214]

3 hours ago, EmblemJD said:

Hey @Luke

I have a question regarding this functionality as well (similar to an earlier request brought up here (did not want to necro a 2 year old post though)

I have a number of home videos, where obviously Screen Grabber will be the only option for thumbnails. Any chance we could a bit more control than just "enable/disable"?
Case in point, the fixed value of "take image of first 10% into the video" can create awkward thumbnails like people blinking mid-sentence. What would be great is to have at least a "Create new random thumbnail image" in the menu, which slightly offsets the 10% fixed value. This way it could be a nice compromise for the few videos where the thumbnail is really ridiculous

Any possibility to implement that easily or could you maybe hint me at a workaround? Many thanks for the great work on Emby btw!

Hi, yes that kind of option is possible for future updates. thanks.

[rbjtech 4324]

9 hours ago, EmblemJD said:

Hey @Luke

I have a question regarding this functionality as well (similar to an earlier request brought up here (did not want to necro a 2 year old post though)

I have a number of home videos, where obviously Screen Grabber will be the only option for thumbnails. Any chance we could a bit more control than just "enable/disable"?
Case in point, the fixed value of "take image of first 10% into the video" can create awkward thumbnails like people blinking mid-sentence. What would be great is to have at least a "Create new random thumbnail image" in the menu, which slightly offsets the 10% fixed value. This way it could be a nice compromise for the few videos where the thumbnail is really ridiculous

Any possibility to implement that easily or could you maybe hint me at a workaround? Many thanks for the great work on Emby btw!

I'm not sure of the actual time point when the snapshot is taken - but by looking in the logs, it's pretty easy to re-create the syntax and then specify when you wish the thumbnail to be created.

As an example - find "Info App: ProcessRun 'extract-image' Execute:" in the log file.

C:\Emby-Server\system\ffmpeg.exe -ss 00:00:04.315  -f mp4 -threads 1 -i file:"\\media\HomeVideo\2016\Various\215.mp4" -an -sn -threads 0 -vframes 1 -vf "scale=trunc(min(max(iw\,ih*dar)\,min(600\,0*dar))/2)*2:trunc(min(max(iw/dar\,ih)\,min(600/dar\,0))/2)*2,thumbnail=24" -f image2 "C:\Emby-Server\programdata\cache\temp\caa4c71e-3dcb-4adb-812f-3ce1c13341bc.jpg"

The red section is the time it jumps to when it takes the snapshot, blue is the media file and the green section is the resulting jpg.

So just modify the path for where ffmpeg is for your system, and swap out the values above to create your own jpg - then simply do an edit image in the metadata, and replace with your custom created image.

 

 

 

 

[EmblemJD 17]

On 06/06/2021 at 22:30, rbjtech said:

I'm not sure of the actual time point when the snapshot is taken - but by looking in the logs, it's pretty easy to re-create the syntax and then specify when you wish the thumbnail to be created.

As an example - find "Info App: ProcessRun 'extract-image' Execute:" in the log file.

C:\Emby-Server\system\ffmpeg.exe -ss 00:00:04.315  -f mp4 -threads 1 -i file:"\\media\HomeVideo\2016\Various\215.mp4" -an -sn -threads 0 -vframes 1 -vf "scale=trunc(min(max(iw\,ih*dar)\,min(600\,0*dar))/2)*2:trunc(min(max(iw/dar\,ih)\,min(600/dar\,0))/2)*2,thumbnail=24" -f image2 "C:\Emby-Server\programdata\cache\temp\caa4c71e-3dcb-4adb-812f-3ce1c13341bc.jpg"

The red section is the time it jumps to when it takes the snapshot, blue is the media file and the green section is the resulting jpg.

So just modify the path for where ffmpeg is for your system, and swap out the values above to create your own jpg - then simply do an edit image in the metadata, and replace with your custom created image.

 

 

 

 

Hey @rbjtech

Many thanks for the thorough how-to! In the end it is just a handful of files so instead of scripting around, I ended up taking a screenshot of a preferred scene and uploading that manually But maybe @Luke can use this as a simple starting point to implement a "Shuffle thumbnail" button in the "Edit Image" menu by randomizing the -ss parameter timestamp

Cheers,
EmblemJD

[GrimReaper 3329]

On 6/6/2021 at 1:08 PM, EmblemJD said:

I have a number of home videos, where obviously Screen Grabber will be the only option for thumbnails. Any chance we could a bit more control than just "enable/disable"?
Case in point, the fixed value of "take image of first 10% into the video" can create awkward thumbnails like people blinking mid-sentence. What would be great is to have at least a "Create new random thumbnail image" in the menu, which slightly offsets the 10% fixed value. This way it could be a nice compromise for the few videos where the thumbnail is really ridiculous

Any possibility to implement that easily or could you maybe hint me at a workaround? 

Or use TMM, in which you have more granular control over images created, based on your setting.