Video thumbnailer I wrote ...
 

If anyone's interested I have a cool little windows app I wrote that monitors a configurable directory for incoming movie files. When they arrive it uses windows media player to extract a configurable number of thumbnails of a configurable (or original) size. Takes the thumbs and the original video and packages it up in a directory and moves it to a configurable location.

I use it for monitoring an incoming directory on a windows server that I FTP up to. It takes the movies and packages them up to later be described and what not in another app I wrote.

Will consider selling a few copies if there's any interest.

it might be interesting

what input formats?

and can you post a screenshot from a HD video?

I'm using it on WMV, but it should support any format that Medial Player 10 will play.

What it's actually doing, under the hood, is extracting a frame straight out of the movie. Give me an example file and I'll run it through if you like.

here's a sample file - it's hdv mpeg2

http://www.amazingcontent.com/pubpre...iler01_hdv.mpg

i'm curious to see if that works

Okay the way I have it configured for my use is to take frames in the original size. It can also be configured to resize them to any given size although you must give both x and y it won't calculate a change in the ratio its self. You tell it to take X number of thumbs (I said go ahead and take 5) and it then divides the video by that number and takes a frame at each of the calculated durations. Your video was 20 seconds, so they're about 4 seconds apart. I ran it once at original size and then again a 320x180 and gave you both sets of 5 grabs.

It's just configured this way for my use, but I can easily customize basically in any way you like. To take thumbs at a given duration, to exclude time from the begining and end of the clip from being included in thumbnailing.

http://www.serpentstudios.com/madalton.zip

the results are pretty good - just a little big. are you using 100% jpeg quality? 85-90% should be enough and reduce the filesize a lot. or make that a variable too.

something else to consider: does the watchfolder also accept shortcuts? my video encoding program for example does and this way i don't need to move or copy those huge files around - just drop a couple of hundred or thousand shortcuts in the watchfolder and the rest goes automatically

but regarding your first question: when it works that way you should definitely consider selling it. i would buy it if it was in the $20-$40 range.

I'd be interested in how you're doing the sample grabbing. Sounds like you're not using the SampleGrabber DirectShow filter, or your particular mpeg2 decoder doesn't use video header 2 (which the grabber filter doesn't support).

For my apps I grab the sample off the renderer pin. Is that how you're doing it?