On Demand HLS Stream Thumbnails

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Is it possible to get thumbnails for entire hls stream (say every 10 seconds) using iframe only / byte range playlist ? We are not generating thumbnails using ffmpeg but is there any way using wowza to do this ?

2

Hello,

Thanks for contacting the Wowza Community!

Here is a link on generating thumbnails via API and code. Is this what you are looking for?

Generate Thumbnails for Live Streams

Using the Transcoder, you can also generate thumbnails.

Timed Thumbnail Generation

Hope this helps. If any further questions, feel free to reach out.

regards,

Jermaine

3

Hi Jermaine

Thanks for reply but as I mentioned I need this for OD stream and not live. I came across those articles before but they dont mention anything about OD Streams.

Thanks

4

I use FFMPEG to generate thumbnails for VOD. If you have ffmpeg installed, this command generates a folder with the name of your .mp4 file, and it will run the command to generate a thumbnail image every 10th frame, with a size of 128x72. It wil name them thumb0000.jpg, but all these variables can be changed for your specific needs.

for %%a in (".mp4") do md “%%~na” for %%a in (".mp4") do ffmpeg -i “%%a” -vf fps=1/10 -s 128x72 “%%~na\thumb%%04d.jpg” pause

5

Thanks , for input vincev100, I have come across this option as well however this will not work well because we have huge number of already transcoded files and generating thumbnails will be hard for all files. So we were looking if there was an on fly option using the fast forward functionality that ios has where it shows thumbnails from the stream.

6

I hear you, we had to do the same thing. We went back and created thumbs for about 1000 or so recordings. Now it’s part of our transcoding job, so we only use FFMPEG for one off jobs.