

Ask HN: Thumbnail API - matthewarkin

I&#x27;m working on a project where I sometimes need to create thumbnails of a video. After some Googling, it doesn&#x27;t seem like there is an API that will just give me a thumbnail of a video. The APIs that do exist want to me encode the entire video and as part of the encoding I can get a thumbnail.<p>Would this sort of API be helpful to anyone else? If so, I&#x27;d be happy to work on opening it up. If not, I&#x27;ll just keep it to myself.
======
csclark
We would definitely give it a try - Video Thumbnails can be tricky, as it
makes all the difference for a user to view it or not.

For instance, generally the first second of video is blank, though taking a
thumbnail at the middle is not necessarily representative.

~~~
matthewarkin
Yea, that is a tricky part. Most of the video encoding services can be
configured to take a thumbnail at the beginning, at a user determined point,
or every X seconds.

In my use case,I don't necessarily have any reason to have the entire video
encoded and it adds an unnecessarily complicated structure.

Currently I just take a thumbnail .1 second in (this also allows me to utilize
minimal bandwidth since I don't download the entire video), but it should be
fairly easy to add a parameter

