avi-thumbnailer readme

The package consists of two shell scripts, avithumb.sh and thumber.sh.

avithumb.sh

This program thumbnails argv[1] into a JPEG file named argv[2]. It takes it from a frame a few seconds into the video, unlike Windows XP does it. This means:

1. Video thumbnails are meaningful - 99% of the time the first frame is blank or meaningless in XP.
2. It doesn't seek too far in, so the content of the video isn't "spoiled".

This script requires mencoder and mplayer.

thumber.sh

This script takes all video files without "covers" in MythTV, and makes "covers" using avithumb.sh. You need to symlink avithumb.sh to avithumb, and put it in your PATH.

This will only scan paths containing the words "TV Series", where a cover isn't already there according to the database. Once the job is done all records are assumed to be correct, and the database is updated with the new "cover" details.

This creates the thumbnails in the same directory as the video, with the same name as the video, with "_t.jpg" appended to the filename. You should be able to use this with another script to create web based thumbnails of your video files.