Thumbnails not showing in video in Ubuntu 18.04

Question

I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I've manually installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Everything looks fine except video thumbnails. How to solve this?

Answer 1

Install FFMPEG Thumbnailer-

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then close and reopen file manager. Thumbnails for most video files should generate now.

However, if it's still not working then open file manager, go to your home folder if you're not already there (Home folder is usually the folder which contains Downloads, Documents, Photos etc folders).

Press Ctrl+H, enter into the folder named .cache. Then enter in the folder thumbnails.
Delete everything in there. Restart your PC.

Answer 2

I have tried HattinGokbori87's solution but it failed, and I found another way to solve it.

First I installed the HattinGokbori87's suggested package like this:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then I restarted the computer but I still could not see the video's thumbnails in the file manager, so I tried to install another package like this:

sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav

Then cleaned up the directory like this:

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail

Then reopen the file manager, it works!

Refer to this article if your Ubuntu 18.04 thumbnails still do not work.

Update: For Ubuntu 20.04 this method still works (I just upgraded my computer operating system from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 20.04).

Update (2023-2-8): For Ubuntu 22.04 and Pop!_OS 22.04, this method still works.

Answer 3

Install following packages

ffmpeg,ffmpegthumbnailer,gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg ffmpegthumbnailer gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Then edit the following file with respective content

sudo vi /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer

just paste the following lines

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10
MimeType=application/mxf;application/ogg;application/ram;application/sdp;application/vnd.ms-wpl;application/vnd.rn-realmedia;application/x-extension-m4a;application/x-extension-mp4;application/x-flash-video;application/x-matroska;application/x-netshow-channel;application/x-ogg;application/x-quicktimeplayer;application/x-shorten;image/vnd.rn-realpix;image/x-pict;misc/ultravox;text/x-google-video-pointer;video/3gpp;video/dv;video/fli;video/flv;video/mp2t;video/mp4;video/mp4v-es;video/mpeg;video/msvideo;video/ogg;video/quicktime;video/vivo;video/vnd.divx;video/vnd.rn-realvideo;video/vnd.vivo;video/webm;video/x-anim;video/x-avi;video/x-flc;video/x-fli;video/x-flic;video/x-flv;video/x-m4v;video/x-matroska;video/x-mpeg;video/x-ms-asf;video/x-ms-asx;video/x-msvideo;video/x-ms-wm;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-ms-wmx;video/x-ms-wvx;video/x-nsv;video/x-ogm+ogg;video/x-theora+ogg;video/x-totem-stream;audio/x-pn-realaudio;audio/3gpp;audio/ac3;audio/AMR;audio/AMR-WB;audio/basic;audio/midi;audio/mp2;audio/mp4;audio/mpeg;audio/ogg;audio/prs.sid;audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;audio/x-aiff;audio/x-ape;audio/x-flac;audio/x-gsm;audio/x-it;audio/x-m4a;audio/x-matroska;audio/x-mod;audio/x-mp3;audio/x-mpeg;audio/x-ms-asf;audio/x-ms-asx;audio/x-ms-wax;audio/x-ms-wma;audio/x-musepack;audio/x-pn-aiff;audio/x-pn-au;audio/x-pn-wav;audio/x-pn-windows-acm;audio/x-realaudio;audio/x-real-audio;audio/x-sbc;audio/x-speex;audio/x-tta;audio/x-wav;audio/x-wavpack;audio/x-vorbis;audio/x-vorbis+ogg;audio/x-xm;application/x-flac;

and finally restart your machine and see.

Answer 4

I think there's a bug either in totem-video-thumbnailer or GStreamer.

When you search for solutions, many of them suggest ffmpegthumbnailer.

I can't say whether it's a better, or a worse thumbnailer, but installing it did work for me.

The only caveat is that you seem to have to configure configure things to override the system default. I couldn't find what the default processing order is for conflicting thumbnailers in the same directory, but thumbnailers in ~/.local/share/thumbnailers appear to take precedence over /usr/share/thumbnailers

Creating a link solved my problem:

ln -s /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

A couple of notes:

1. Here is an excellent answer with a swag of background about how thumbnailing hangs together

2. You may quit nautilus/nemo by running them with the -q flag

   $nautilus -q
   $nemo -q
   

3. Deleting the contents of ~/.cache/thumbnails causes thumbnails to be rebuilt the next time they are needed

Answer 5

Use ffmpeg by creating a thumbnailer entry that invokes ffmpeg. The thumbnailer will run for MIME types video/mp4 and video/webm, but additional types can be added as desired.

sudo apt install ffmpeg 
echo -e "[Thumbnailer Entry]\nTryExec=ffmpeg\nExec=ffmpeg -i %i -vf thumbnail,scale=\"256:-1\" -frames:v 1 %o\nMimeType=video/mp4;video/webm" | sudo tee /usr/share/thumbnailers/custom-ffmpeg.thumbnailer
rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*
nohup nautilus -q > /dev/null &

Answer 6

I followed HattinGokbori87's instructions above, that is:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then delete thumbnail cache and restart

This fixed my issue, which was that only some mp4 files have thumbnails. However, it also removed existing mpeg thumbnails.

So, I remove ffmpegthumbnailer:

sudo apt remove ffmpegthumbnailer

Then delete thumbnail cache and restart

And it works, I guess all I really needed to do was delete the cache and restart.