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Ask HN: Thumbnail API

1 points by matthewarkin ↗ HN
I'm working on a project where I sometimes need to create thumbnails of a video. After some Googling, it doesn't seem like there is an API that will just give me a thumbnail of a video. The APIs that do exist want to me encode the entire video and as part of the encoding I can get a thumbnail.

Would this sort of API be helpful to anyone else? If so, I'd be happy to work on opening it up. If not, I'll just keep it to myself.

2 comments

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csclark
We would definitely give it a try - Video Thumbnails can be tricky, as it makes all the difference for a user to view it or not.

For instance, generally the first second of video is blank, though taking a thumbnail at the middle is not necessarily representative.

matthewarkin
Yea, that is a tricky part. Most of the video encoding services can be configured to take a thumbnail at the beginning, at a user determined point, or every X seconds.

In my use case,I don't necessarily have any reason to have the entire video encoded and it adds an unnecessarily complicated structure.

Currently I just take a thumbnail .1 second in (this also allows me to utilize minimal bandwidth since I don't download the entire video), but it should be fairly easy to add a parameter