I want all of my video thumbnails to actually show what the video is about

November 26, 2010 4:17 PM

How can I change video thumbnails in Vista?

By default Windows displays the first frame as the video thumbnail, but this is useless if the first frame is black or any other non-descript image. I've scoured Google for a solution to this problem to no avail. It seems to be fairly common, and I just couldn't find a clear, no-nonsense way to solve it.

One proposed solution was to open the video in movie editing software and then change the first frame of the video, but I've never used any movie editing software before so I have no clue how to do that. Would Windows Movie Maker be able to do it, and if so, how?

posted by Ryogen to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

By default Windows displays the first frame as the video thumbnail

Actually, I believe it doesn't - by default, I think Vista displays a frame from the centre of the video.

But - and it's a big 'but' - that only happens when the standard WMP codecs are the default handler for that filetype. If you've installed any codec packs (e.g. CCCP, K-Lite, etc) or other video playing / editing software that installs its own codecs (e.g. VLC, Nero), Windows is probably using those codecs rather than the default. The solution is to :

1. Disable / uninstall the other codecs,
2. Make sure WMP is the default player for video filetypes,
3. Make sure the registry entry HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.XXX\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1} (where .XXX is your filetype e.g. .AVI) is the default value of {327669A0-59A7-4be9-B99E-1C9F3A57611A} - you'll need to do this for each video filetype, and
4. Delete the thumbs.db (preview icon cache) file from each folder that contains videos.

Next time you open that directory, new thumbnail images as determined by the registry value will be generated by the appropriate WMP codec, and stored in a newly-created thumbs.db file.

Caveat: that is all from some notes I made a while ago, but I don't have a Windows machine handy at the moment to check the details.

(Background: Windows uses the default codec to generate thumbnails. Most 3rd-party codecs ignore the registry value & choose the first frame (some, like certain versions of the Haali splitter, can be configured to use a particular frame but IIRC this has been removed from the last few versions). Once the frame is stored in the thumbs.db file, it's not generated again.)
posted by Pinback at 6:06 PM on November 26, 2010

Response by poster: I am using codecs, so yeah, you must be right about the Vista default. But then, that puts me in a bit of a dilemma. Many of the video thumbnails are fine starting from the first frame, but some of them show a black screen capture or some similarly useless image. And I actually prefer Media Player Classic over WMP as the default player. I may just have to do without, but could there be any other possible solutions?
posted by Ryogen at 7:13 PM on November 26, 2010

Well, the only options I can think of are :

1. Your original idea of copying a single frame from the middle of the video onto the beginning. It'd work, but would almost certainly require re-encoding and resultant loss of quality. AVIsynth could be used to automate the process. You'd also have to take into account the framerate of the video, and either set the audio offset or pad the audio (e.g. by 40ms for a 25fps video) to account for the extra frame at the start.
2. Find an older configurable version version of the Haali splitter, install that, and rebuild your thumbnail caches as mentioned in step 4 above. MPC (iirc) by default uses its own built in splitter/demuxer, so the Haali splitter would only be used by Explorer to generate thumbnails. Have a look at posts 17 and 25 here for how you might go about that.

Be aware that thumbnail generation was removed from the Haali splitter because it caused some problems, so YMMV.
posted by Pinback at 8:23 PM on November 26, 2010

Be also aware that the Haali splitter is notorious for causing trouble with other codecs for things like AVCHD (hi-def camcorder) videos. Perhaps they've fixed it in (very) recent days, but I wouldn't go installing it without absolutely knowing what you're doing. Even then, I still wouldn't...
posted by wkearney99 at 9:48 AM on November 27, 2010