Imagorvideo is the ffmpeg based plugin for Imagor to handle video files. Imagor is an image optimization API/server. With Imagorvideo you can use URL parameters to request a frame from a local or remote video file. Since it now supports percentage indexes, a remote file doesn't have to be known to you. You could simply say that you want to get a frame from somewhere in the middle of the file. Adding the parameter "seek(0.5)" to the URL would request frames from around the middle of the file and then select the one frame that scores the best from a RMSE histogram. The frame can the go through the rest of Imagor pipeline and be re-sized, smartcropped, converted to JPEG, AVIF and so on. The image processing parameters are based on the Thumbor URL format.
I've been using Imagor and Imagorvideo for sometime now and am very happy with it, especially since I often work with video files that aren't known to me (e.g. UGC or remote files). In my use case this has replaced Thumbor and a whole bunch of shell scripts and various other glue to handle unknown files.
I assume that target audience would be somebody who is going to use this as one of the services in their stack. Like E-commerce site, video streaming etc.
We've built something similar long time ago and ability to control filters from client (as they are part of URL) is very powerful. E.g. clients with different native resolution, or ah hoc overlays are all under the frontend control and nicely cachable.
If all you need is to generate thumbnail from the first frame of local video file, then ffmpeg cli with a bunch of shell scripts already does the job.
I use this for web video thumbnail manipulation. Having on-the-fly control right from the URL gives more versatility e.g. seeking by percentage, skipping the black frames etc. And this is more well suited with cloud storages.
Sounds like it might also be useful for implementing "contact sheet" plugins for media players, like https://github.com/occivink/mpv-gallery-view (I believe this script presently re-opens the video file for each screenshot it makes, rather than seeking)
I've been using Imagor and Imagorvideo for sometime now and am very happy with it, especially since I often work with video files that aren't known to me (e.g. UGC or remote files). In my use case this has replaced Thumbor and a whole bunch of shell scripts and various other glue to handle unknown files.