No video thumbnails on nautilus

LucetLux · 2013-08-21 22:19:51

The title pretty much describes it, I'm getting no video thumbnails on nautilus, I tried following solutions proposed in some older threads on this forum with no luck, I tried installing ffmpegthumnailer, ffmpeg, and all of the gstreamer plugins, reloaded gnome as suggested, even rebooted and video thumbnails are still not being generated.
I also tried deleting ~/.chache/thumbnails/fail .

Any ideas ?
Thanks in advance.

Last edited by LucetLux (2013-08-21 22:21:47)

ondoho · 2013-08-22 04:53:05

you surely checked everything in nautilus' preferences?

LucetLux · 2013-08-23 21:07:26

There's no such thing as nautilus preferences on Gnome 3

Michael Catanzaro · 2013-08-23 23:03:38

I think Totem (Videos) provides the thumbnails for Nautilus; do you have that installed?

Preferences are in the app menu; upper-left of the screen, just right of the word "Activities." You probably need to play with "Preview -> Files -> Only for files smaller than" which defaults to 10 MB. Hm, that probably should not affect videos....

Last edited by Michael Catanzaro (2013-08-23 23:06:04)

LucetLux · 2013-08-24 01:21:31

Yes totem is installed, I tried changing "Only for files smaller than" but sadly that didn't change anything.

bwat47 · 2013-08-24 01:41:35

LucetLux wrote:

There's no such thing as nautilus preferences on Gnome 3

This is not true, there is still a preferences dialogue in nautilus 3.8, you need to click on where is says "nautilus" on the gnome-shell panel to bring up the gmenu thing and there is a 'preferences' entry there (it only shows in this menu, it does not show in the gear-menu).

http://i.imgur.com/WbrVF3j.png

Last edited by bwat47 (2013-08-24 01:43:24)

ooo · 2013-08-24 15:16:27

bwat47 wrote:

(it only shows in this menu, it does not show in the gear-menu).

strange, for me its visible in the gear menu. I'm not using gnome shell though.

anyway, back to the topic.

If you have totem installed, thumbnails should work out of the box. I don't really have any idea why it wouldn't unless you have messed around with something that disables it.

If you want to use ffmpegthumbnailer with nautilus, you need to create ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer with this content something like this:

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png
#Exec=/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f #add "film"borders
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;

after that, clear thumbnail cache and nautilus -q and you're good to go.

Nepherte · 2013-08-24 17:57:14

Michael Catanzaro wrote:

I think Totem (Videos) provides the thumbnails for Nautilus

ffmpegthumbnailer can create thumbnailsof videos as well.

ooo wrote:

If you want to use ffmpegthumbnailer with nautilus, you need to create ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer

This is not necessary: ffmpegthumbnailer contains such a file at /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

ooo · 2013-08-24 18:17:37

Nepherte wrote:

ooo wrote:
If you want to use ffmpegthumbnailer with nautilus, you need to create ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer
This is not necessary: ffmpegthumbnailer contains such a file at /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

If I'm not mistaken, there's no way to tell nautilus which thumbnailer to use, and its just hard coded to use totem.
this is why you have to fool it with fake totem.thumbnailer file that actually uses ffmpegthumbnailer.

correct if I'm wrong, or there's some other way. I did this quite a while ago so my information on the subject might be a bit out of date (or just incorrect)

edit. although. since that file exists you could just cp /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer
which makes life just a little bit easier

Last edited by ooo (2013-08-24 20:01:37)

Nepherte · 2013-08-24 21:29:09

Nautilus does not hardcode the thumbnailer to use at all. In fact, it's configurable. I just looked it up on the website of ffmpegthumnailer: http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegthumbnailer/wiki/Faq

I'm not 100% sure how accurate the information is on the website, but I know that I use nautilus with ffmpegthumbnailer. Unfortunately, I don't have acces to my linux machine at the moment to verify it.

Last edited by Nepherte (2013-08-24 21:31:17)

ooo · 2013-08-24 21:46:09

Nepherte wrote:

Nautilus does not hardcode the thumbnailer to use at all. In fact, it's configurable. I just looked it up on the website of ffmpegthumnailer: http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegthumbnailer/wiki/Faq

this is for gnome2. gnome3 uses dconf instead of gconf, and I've checked that you can't set the thumbnailer via dconf. see the comments on that page. there's also a link to page with instructions to do exactly what I've done.

sorry LucetLux, as this has gone slightly off topic. hopefully you get your thumbnails to work some way or another.

Nepherte · 2013-08-25 21:37:03

ooo wrote:

this is for gnome2. gnome3 uses dconf instead of gconf, and I've checked that you can't set the thumbnailer via dconf. see the comments on that page. there's also a link to page with instructions to do exactly what I've done.

Aye it appears the instructions are for gnome2. Nonetheless, I still have thumbnails in nautilus through ffmpegthumbnailer without the "totem.thumbnailer hack".

Have you made sure that your thumnailer command works by invoking it manually?

ffmpegthumbnailer -i <input_file> -o <output_file>

Here's some data from my system:

$ ls /usr/share/thumbnailers/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 237 Jul 16 00:59 ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

$ ls ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/
ls: cannot access /home/bart/.local/share/thumbnailers/: No such file or directory

$ cat /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer 
[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -i %i -o %o -s %s -f
MimeType=video/jpeg;video/mp4;video/mpeg;video/quicktime;video/x-ms-asf;video/x-ms-wm;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-msvideo;video/x-flv;video/x-matroska;

Last edited by Nepherte (2013-08-25 21:37:33)

bwat47 · 2013-08-26 00:23:19

It works fine for me without having to rename the ffmpegthumbnailer file... All I had to do was pacman -Rs totem. Nautilus isn't "hardcoded" to use totem.thumbnailer, but it does "prefer it" when its there. If totem.thumbnailer is not present it will use ffmpeg.thumbnailer.

LucetLux · 2013-08-26 20:46:17

Thank you all for your help, you did kind of get me even more confused about this, but anyway

Nepherte wrote:

ooo wrote:
this is for gnome2. gnome3 uses dconf instead of gconf, and I've checked that you can't set the thumbnailer via dconf. see the comments on that page. there's also a link to page with instructions to do exactly what I've done.
Aye it appears the instructions are for gnome2. Nonetheless, I still have thumbnails in nautilus through ffmpegthumbnailer without the "totem.thumbnailer hack".
Have you made sure that your thumnailer command works by invoking it manually?
ffmpegthumbnailer -i <input_file> -o <output_file>

Odd, when I try that I get:

Not a native file, thumbnailing will likely fail
Error: basic_string::substr

I tried it with various files, mkv, flv, wmv, none worked.

Nepherte · 2013-08-26 21:30:26

LucetLux wrote:

Not a native file, thumbnailing will likely fail

I receive that warning message as well

LucetLux wrote:

Error: basic_string::substr

but not this second one. However, the thumbnails are still created. If, in your case, the thumbnail is not generated, that would explain why you don't get them in nautilus.

Are you sure that you typed the command correctly (e.g. escaping whitespace characters if they are present in the file name?) I suppose you could always try to recompile ffmpegthumbnailer to verify wether it is a packaging issue. Other than that, I'm clueluess.

LucetLux · 2013-10-12 07:13:19

Welp, I was never able to fix this, so I'm coming back to it now.

totem-video-thumbnailer, the default tumbnailer for gnome, should work fine in the first place, so why would I even use another thumbnailer ? I'm just trying to get around the issue without actually solving it.

I tried running totem-video-thumbnailer manually with some video files, and I was surprised to see that it works just fine, there's nothing wrong with it, so I'm even more intrigued as to why thumbnails for videos aren't automatically generated.

I checked the contents of /.cache/thumbnails, there are some 20-something files in /fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory , not many, considering I have like a thousand video files, whereas in the other folders, /normal and /large all the thumbnails there are for songs, pictures and random files, not a single one for videos.
So I came to the conclusion that gnome, nautilus, or whatever the balls it is isn't even trying to generate thumbnails for videos, therefore what I need is a way to activate automatic video thumbnail generation with totem and nothing else, as to how to do that, I have no idea whatsoever, that's why I'm here

I already tried removing every single video thumbnailer but the default one, reinstalling gnome and totem, none of that made any difference.
It would be nice if I could just choose which thumbnailer to use in a plain, simple configuration dialog, like in KDE, but gnome is evil.

Any ideas on how to solve this would be appreciated as always.
Thanks in advance.

jancici · 2013-10-12 21:23:27

I have problems with thumbnails too after update to gnome 3.10.
I did try several trick but still some files has not thumbs ... some file has.
But I am using nemo not nautilus. If I start nautilus and browse directory I can see that thumbs are generated. I can see those in nemo after that. But while browsing diretory bith nemo thums are not generated.

any idea? thanks.

LucetLux · 2013-10-14 01:07:24

jancici wrote:

I have problems with thumbnails too after update to gnome 3.10.
I did try several trick but still some files has not thumbs ... some file has.
But I am using nemo not nautilus. If I start nautilus and browse directory I can see that thumbs are generated. I can see those in nemo after that. But while browsing diretory bith nemo thums are not generated.
any idea? thanks.

Well, it seems like nemo and nautilus share thumbnails, this could be expected as nemo is a fork of nautilus, however it looks like that they don't share thumbnail generation, I couldn't find anything useful regarding how thumbnails are generated in nemo, sorry, maybe having both nautilus and nemo installed at the same time is causing some issues.

Isn't there any way to tell nautilus which thumbnailers to use like there's in kde ? That could be useful.

giowck · 2013-11-01 10:10:07

I have the same problem, nautilus doesn't generate thumbnails for video files.

totem-video-thumbnailer is installed, all gstreamer plugins are installed, why is it not working?

giowck · 2013-11-01 10:35:17

solved with: "pacman -S gst-libav gst-plugins-ugly"

anark10n · 2013-11-10 11:37:27

solved with: "pacman -S gst-libav gst-plugins-ugly"

Already have them installed, reinstalling them doesn't help any either.

kitus · 2017-03-21 22:06:10

I have the same problem but only with mp4 videos, as here says, you must install gst-libav and remove directory thumbnails cache

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail

It works for me...

WorMzy · 2017-03-21 22:35:14

Please do not necrobump.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … bumping.22

Closing.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-08-21 22:19:51

No video thumbnails on nautilus

#2 2013-08-22 04:53:05

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#3 2013-08-23 21:07:26

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#4 2013-08-23 23:03:38

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#5 2013-08-24 01:21:31

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#6 2013-08-24 01:41:35

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#7 2013-08-24 15:16:27

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#8 2013-08-24 17:57:14

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#9 2013-08-24 18:17:37

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#10 2013-08-24 21:29:09

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#11 2013-08-24 21:46:09

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#12 2013-08-25 21:37:03

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#13 2013-08-26 00:23:19

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#14 2013-08-26 20:46:17

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#15 2013-08-26 21:30:26

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#16 2013-10-12 07:13:19

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#17 2013-10-12 21:23:27

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#18 2013-10-14 01:07:24

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#19 2013-11-01 10:10:07

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#20 2013-11-01 10:35:17

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#21 2013-11-10 11:37:27

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#22 2017-03-21 22:06:10

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

#23 2017-03-21 22:35:14

Re: No video thumbnails on nautilus

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