Grey / black thumbnail for video files with the format MPEG 1-2

[Phoenix2014]

Hello,

 

I have imported about 1000 video files to my daminion database. For most media formats (avi, DivX, FLV, mov, mpeg-4) thumbnails were correctly created for every video file.

 

But over 70% of my video files with the media format "MPEG 1-2" have no thumbnail. Instead there is only a dark-grey or black area as thumbnail. I do not know if no thumbnail was created at all or if this might be a problem with "trying to create a thumbnail from the first video frame, that is often black or grey".

 

The "MPEG 1-2"-video-files with grey thumbnails can be played with mplayer and vlc media player.

 

 

Has someone an idea what might cause this problem?

 

(Sorry, I can not send a sample file, because they are rather large and I am on a very slow internet connection)

[Uwe]

Hello,

 

the same in the server version.

 

Regards, Uwe

[Murat]

This is a problem of MPlayer that cannot generate the thumbnail in some cases.

 

We capture a frame from 1/3 length of videos to generate thumbnails. And for some files MPlayer can successfully generate it from 1/4 or 1/5 of the file length but fails when I tried to capture it from 1/3 length.

[Phoenix2014]

This is a problem of MPlayer that cannot generate the thumbnail in some cases.

 

We capture a frame from 1/3 length of videos to generate thumbnails. And for some files MPlayer can successfully generate it from 1/4 or 1/5 of the file length but fails when I tried to capture it from 1/3 length.

 

It seems that you are right.

MPlayer needs a keyframe to correctly create a thumbnail. Otherwise, the thumbnail is grey as it is in my case.

 

 

I found the following suggested solutions

 

- to use mplayer2

Differences from MPlayer to mplayer2

...

Support for precise seeks

It’s now possible to seek to any frame in the video; seeks are no longer necessarily limited to keyframes.

(http://www.mplayer2.org/differences/)

 

 

- or to create several thumbnails and use the last one

Once a key frame is hit the following thumbnails look correct.

(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11928556/extracting-thumbnails-with-mplayer-result-in-grey-images)

 

 

But it seems that none of these suggested solutions are helpful with daminion (there is no setting for the video-thumbnail creation and of course it is not possible to simply change the mplayer version)...

 

Let's hope daminion will soon find a solution for this problem...

[Murat]

MPlayer2 is not updated for a while.

[Mike*V]

I'm new here, trying out Daminion 3.4 and experiencing a problem with thumbnails for mts files. There are areas of the thumbnails that are gray blotches as shown in attached file.

 

This problem may be related to those described in this thread.

 

Are there any solutions or work-arounds for this?

[Murat]

You can try to update the MPlayer version by yourself: just replace the MPLayer.exe in the MediaProcessor\VideoProcessor folder.

 

If someone will send us a sample MPEG2 or MPEG video so we can reproduce this issue probably we can play a bit with the recent MPlayer version.

[Mike*V]

You can try to update the MPlayer version by yourself: just replace the MPLayer.exe in the MediaProcessor\VideoProcessor folder.

 

If someone will send us a sample MPEG2 or MPEG video so we can reproduce this issue probably we can play a bit with the recent MPlayer version.

 

Hi, Murat

 

I shared a dropbox folder with you that has two MTS files. After some experimentation, I found that thumbnails for videos in this format that were 16 MB or smaller were OK. Thumbnails for videos larger than 33 MB were corrupted. The thumbnail generated for the smaller file in dropbox is fine. The thumbnail for the larger one is corrupted. ...on my system, anyway.

 

Please let me know if you see the same results.

 

I looked at the MPlayer and didn't understand the process of choosing a version well enough to try your suggestion to update MPlayer.

 

It did occur to me that I have several pretty good players here and I wondered if there was an option for daminion to allow the user to select a different player, in case they have one they like.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

[Mike*V]

Hi, Murat

 

I shared a dropbox folder with you that has two MTS files. After some experimentation, I found that thumbnails for videos in this format that were 16 MB or smaller were OK. Thumbnails for videos larger than 33 MB were corrupted. The thumbnail generated for the smaller file in dropbox is fine. The thumbnail for the larger one is corrupted. ...on my system, anyway.

 

Please let me know if you see the same results.

 

I looked at the MPlayer and didn't understand the process of choosing a version well enough to try your suggestion to update MPlayer.

 

It did occur to me that I have several pretty good players here and I wondered if there was an option for daminion to allow the user to select a different player, in case they have one they like.

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

 

Here is what the two mts file thumbnails look like. The clear thumbnail is just the first 4 seconds of the file with the distorted thumbnail.

 

 

I hope adding this problem to a thread on MPEG files wasn't a big mistake...

[Murat]

Thanks for sharing the files. I've played a bit with the MPLayer command line arguments and configration file but there are an unreal number of possible options and configurations so it might require ages to determine the problem with these files.

 

So if you never mind, I suggest you to ask this question on SuperUser.com or AskUbuntu.com and share the link to your video so people can test it. This might be the fastest way unless someone has a better experience with working with the MPlayer than me.

 

The sample command line to capture frame from your video:

mplayer -frames 1 -ss 3 -vf scale=1920:1080 -nosound -really-quiet -msglevel all=-1 -vo jpeg:quality=95 "00001.[2].MTS"