Archive for November 2nd, 2007

Script day – manually find a thumbnail for a video

In a vain effort to fuel my blog with some content ( 😉 ) I’ll try to get into the habit of posting some throw-away scripts I’m writing for my personal use (at work and at home). Hopefully some people would find them interesting, or maybe – god forbid – useful.

Today we have a script that will help you pick out a nice thumbnail for a movie file – this is useful when setting up movie galleries and stuff. Of course it can be done automatically (most gallery software that support video files has automatic thumbnail extraction) but they rarely choose the best shot. The script here below would extract 100 frames from the first 30 seconds of a movie file and display them using an image browser. The script would also open a file browser window – the user will then pick the desired thumbnail image and drop it into the file browser, and then close the image browser. The script would then complete the process by naming the selected thumbnail image to be the same name as the original movie (with a different extension of course).

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