Get thumbnail image of video from video url

Question

Is it possible to get the thumbnail image from a video Url? I need to thumbnails of videos in a list view.

Answer 1

It is possible to get a thumbnail from a video file or url using FFMPEG.

FFMPEG must be built using the NDK (or you can find some Android built FFMPEG binaries). Here is a GitHub project to build FFMPEG:

https://github.com/guardianproject/android-ffmpeg

You can then include the FFMPEG binaries with your app and execute FFMPEG from code in your app to generate an image from the video (local or URL) using a command like:

ffmpeg -i videosite.com/video.flv -ss 00:00:15.000 -vframes 1 thumbnail_out.png

One thing to consider is at what seek time (option -ss) you grab the thumbnail for it to be a meaningful image that represents the video.