Animated gif as video thumbnail

[0xERR0R]

Thumbsup generates a jpeg thumbnail for a video file. It would be cool, if it could be possible to generate a gif with some frames from original video and play them in an endless loop

[rprieto]

Hi, that’s a great idea!

I’m thinking of generating an extra thumbnail, so that themes can choose what to display. They could even display the animation on-hover only, like YouTube does, to avoid having a busy looking page.

Looking at what YouTube does, I have a few questions:

• They seem to randomly select a few seconds from the video, and then create a low-res preview of that. Another option would be to randomly choose 10 frames, and play them at very slow speed (like a slideshow). Both seem possible quite easily with ffmpeg.
• They use WebP format for the video. For now I’m thinking of using GIF as you suggest, first because it’s widely supported, and because it seems easier to swap-out between JPG/GIF when the person hovers.

What do you think?

[0xERR0R]

To keep it simple, I would just take the video length and divide it with (let's say 10) and generate gif with 10 frames (each frame each 1/10 of video's length). For example: 2 min video = 120 sec, each 12th second an image as gifs frame. Animation only on hover is cool, but will it also work on mobile devices?

Regarding the WebP format, to honest, I'm not aware what are the differences, but according to https://caniuse.com/webp it should completely replace GIF and has wide browser support, so maybe it is a better option.

[rprieto]

That's a good point for mobile devices. Looking at YouTube again, they don't show any previews on their mobile website. There might be a "touch" event we can detect, I'm not sure. This is something the themes will be able to customise.

I will look into this feature, thanks again for the suggestion!