How to Create Video Thumbnails Using VLC 1.0

Apparently creating video snapshots, thumbnails, whatever you want to call them with VLC 1.0.2 or later has really changed, and everything out there that I found simply didn’t work.

When I tried to use the documentation I found available the lovely error message came up saying:

The command line options couldn’t be loaded, check that they are valid.
Press the RETURN key to continue…

So I’m on a Windows XP virtual machine but this same thing applies to Linux and Mac OS X. So how can you easily from the command line script the creation of a thumbnail, snapshot, image, etc. from a video?

Here you go!

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --video-filter scene -V dummy
    --scene-height=128 --scene-width=128 --scene-format=jpeg --scene-replace
    --scene-ratio 24 --start-time=6 --stop-time=7 --scene-prefix=thumb
    --scene-path="C:\thumbs"  C:\videos\video_file.mp4 vlc://quit

Now you are probably asking, can you please explain what all those flags and arguments mean? OK.

• –video-filter : This adds post-processing filters to enhance the picture quality, for instance deinterlacing, or distortthe video. In this case we’re using the scene filter for snapshots.
• -V : Specifies a video output module. We don’t want the video to actually play so it’s set to dummy
• –scene-height : The height of the snapshot in pixels
• –scene-width : The width of the snapshot in pixels
• –scene-format : Format of the image. Can be jpeg or png.
• –scene-replace : Replaced the resulting image each time. Remove this flag to have the file named in sequential order.
• –scene-ratio : Ratio of images to record. 3 means that one image out of three is recorded.
• –start-time : Start at this position in seconds
• –stop-time : Stop at this position in seconds
• –scene-prefix : Name the image file with this name. If scene-replace is not specified the file will be named prefixXX.
• –scene-path : Path on file-system to store the snapshots
• C:\video\video_file.mp4 : path to video input file
• vlc://quit : Quit once the process is finished

So, all the best as you try to script the creation of your thumbnail images!

More info: This is working with VLC 1.0.3.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus for Mac OS X Review

(Note: An updated review post is now online)

So, this is one of the last things I thought I’d ever do on my mac. But I installed the beta of ESET antivirus on my laptop this last week after it was available.

It’s seems to be just as good as the Windows version, in fact if I could say so I think it’s even better than the Windows version GUI wise. But in fact it’s really much the same.

There’s only one improvement I could suggest, and that’s a way to disable the icon on the apple menu bar. The dock icon is plenty enough.

Wait! There’s more.

It seems that Truecrypt is not able to mount a volume with ESET running, even if the real-time auto protection is disabled. You see an error message that reads “hdiutil: attach failed – Permission denied”
The only solution that I’ve found is to uninstall ESET NOD32, which I’ve done. And I’m running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Finally one more thing that I believe could be improved upon, is the real-time protection disablement. In order to disable real-time protection you should be prompted for administrator authentication. Currently that is not the case.

eStarling TouchConnect

So, because I figured there’s many people on the internet just like myself, who want to get a video onto the eStarling TouchConnect device, (a connected touchscreen picture/photo frame kind of deal). Here’s some tips on video support as there is no documentation at all.

So they say they support MPEG-4 video, but don’t be fooled. That does not mean H.264. I tried many different encoding variations but to no avail. So when encoding video for the eStarling, make sure that you’re using plain old MPEG-4. And also make sure the file size is not more than 20MB as that is the maximum file size.