Arch Linux

cdysthe

Member

Registered: 2009-11-20

Posts: 62

No thumbnails/preview in Nautilus for files in a smb shared folder.

Hi,

This is a problem I have tried to solve for more than a year by posting in forums, trial and error and a lot of Google searches. For my work I have to look through large folders on a smb share with movie files. I need thumbnails/preview to be able to work efficiently. On Ubuntu and other deb based distros I have thumbnails/preview in Nautilus just by setting it in the Naurilus preferences for networked folders. Not so on Arch (and Antergos). I do have thumbnails/preview for local files, but regardless of what I do not for the smb shared folders. I have of course configured Nautilus to preview all files.

I can see that there are generated failed thumbnails in ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory, so for some reason they are not generated correctly for the movie files in the smb shared folder on Arch. I have tried to install ffmpegthumbnailer and tons of other methods I have found in the forums and elsewhere, but I have not been able to get it to work. And again, on Ubuntu it works out of the box so it's not like there's a bug in Nautilus preventing thumbnails for files on a network share.

I'm running GNOME as my DE, but it doesn't seem to matter which DE I run as long as Nautilus or Nemo is the file manager.

I do not expect a solution, but one can always hope!

shijtin

Member

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 22

Re: No thumbnails/preview in Nautilus for files in a smb shared folder.

I had a similar issue, and it turns out nautilus was using ffmpegthumbnailer instead of totem-video-thumbnailer.
And ffmpegthumbnailer doesn't seem to work with files on "smb://...". It was generating empty pngs.

Do you have totem installed et does this create an image ?

totem-video-thumbnailer "smb://videoserver/pathtovideofile/videofile" test.png

Did you try to uninstall ffmpegthumbnailer or video thumbnailers other than totem ?

Last edited by shijtin (2015-03-03 00:56:25)