Peertube: Add preview thumbnail in video progress bar

[fflorent]

Youtube offers a way to preview the frames when hovering the progress bar. This is very convenient when you want to go directly to a certain moment of a video or to watch it again.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be maintained and convenient plugins for videojs (I saw this one or this another one).

It seems that it is not that difficult. We could use canvas for that: https://jsfiddle.net/epistemex/gdp00x2s/

Also definetely worth to implement it as a plugin.

What do you think?
Florent

[Chocobozzz]

I think it could be suitable in the core PeerTube. I don't think we should use federation for these "progress thumbnails", but a cache as we do with previews.

[ghost]

I found one which is only

• a month old https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-sprite-thumbnails-for-videojs6
• 5 months https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-vtt-thumbnails
• and 6 months https://www.npmjs.com/package/videojs-sprite-thumbnails

would this count, as being maintained?

[tilllt]

I would really like this feature to be added. There would be non js-alternatives to this, like ffmpeg sampling the video at different times on initial thumbnail selection. The problem with how it is in the stable version right now is that the random thumbnail selection often chooses an image which does not represent the video at all.

[Chocobozzz]

@tilllt See https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1322

[davidak]

Timelens is a tool for creating visual timelines. It is used on https://media.ccc.de/.

There are also plugins for JavaScript players: https://timelens.io/plugins/