Last modified: 2012-11-12 20:47:21 UTC
In the past, the parameter thumbtime=0 could be used to specify the first frame of a video as the thumbnail. This no longer works, and thumbtime=0 results in the default thumbnail from the middle of the video. To get the first frame, you must now specify something like thumbtime=0.1.
Now with the deployment of TimedMediaHandler, the thumbtime parameter is not working at all. It appears that all videos are now defaulting to a thumbnail from the middle of the video, regardless of whether thumbtime is set. (I've switched this bug to TimedMediaHandler accordingly.)
Here's an example of videos using the thumbtime parameter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training/Newcomers/Citing_sources The expected behavior is that the thumbnails are the title screens for each video.
This requires a fix in TMH to work with 404 handler thumb creation https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/31372/ and it needs a fix in Core to allow extension to read more params from thumb urls: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/31371/ With those patches in place thumbnail will work again (also with 0) as soon as TMH is deployed on commons. Not sure its possible to fix it with reasonable effort for the transition period.
I agree, we should not be targeting fixes for the transition period state.
Yeah, totally reasonable for the transition period, which hopefully won't be very long. Thanks Jan and Michael!
TMH is on Commons now and those patches are merged, so I'm following up. Thumbtime now partially works, but it's very limited in what it can do compared to before, and it shows some odd behaviors. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ragesoss/thumbtime (current behavior shown in attached screenshot). In particular, now both "thumbtime= 0" and "thumbtime= 0.1" (or anything else between 0 and 1) produce a thumbnail from around the middle of the video, but not the same frame as the default thumbnail. All times seem to be truncated to an integer number of seconds, so there's not as much flexibility as before in choosing the frame you want for the thumbnail. (My use case is that I want to capture the moment of Misou's broadest smile to use as the thumbnail.)
Created attachment 11335 [details] Example of the thumbs current produced with various values of thumbtime
Jan is there anything we can do to improve frame accurate thumbs?
right now times are rounded to seconds. 0 is not working in the currently deployed version but fixed in git. so should start working(showing first frame) with the next deploy. we can also allow float values as opposed to only seconds.
One more thing I noticed: thumbtime only works if there is no space between parameter name and the equals sign. So "thumbtime= 1" works, but "thumbtime = 1" does not. Float values get my vote. If you're going to the trouble of picking a thumb frame at all, it's nice to have fine enough control to pick the frame you want.
first point is more of a parser issue not related to TMH afaik. support for float values added in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/32556/
