Question

I’m using jwplayer to display videos on a website.

I’m looking for a jQuery plugin that can extract thumbnail images from these videos because uploaders upload only the videos, no thumbnails. My aim is to show the videos as thumbnails in a table (like Youtube).

Any ideas how I can achieve this?

Answer 1

It doesn’t work with jQuery. You can’t get jQuery to extract a thumbnail from a video file because it’s a client side Javascript library that doesn’t even know what a “video file” is.

What to do instead: In order to get a video thumbnail you need a server side programming language that has access to the uploaded video file. You can probably do this with any programming language as long as you have an executable program on your server that can extract images.

A simple workflow would be (for example): After the user uploads the file, your website calls a script on the server that extracts the thumbnail and after it has finished, you can redirect the user to the final page.

So, for example, on your server you need ffmpeg and then see what others use to get thumbnails from video files.