videoffmpegmp4

Using chunks of MP4 file for thumbnails


I want to extract single frames (as thumbs) from videos, without having to download the full video file. I would like to just read the mp4 header (the info should be in the moov atom) and then download the required byte ranges. Afaik thats what browsers (HTML5 video) do when you skip to an unbuffered part

I already looked at: How can HTML5 video's byte-range requests (pseudo-streaming) work? but i can't figure out how to use it with ffmpeg for example.

Thanks a lot!


Solution

  • Here's how a general algorithm might operate if you were absolutely determined to make this approach work:

    With all of this information combined, you should be able to download and decode (and thus resize and re-compress for thumbnailing) just the keyframes of an MP4 video.