# Commandline video thumbnailer for FreeBSD?



## gofer_touch (Oct 27, 2014)

Hi all,

I am trying to create thumbnail sheets of around 800 raw video clips for a promotion project to be sent to a client. I have been looking around for a command-line video thumbnailer that will do this but have so far come up short.

Ideally, the kind of functionality that would be needed for batch processing seems to be doable movie thumbnailer - http://moviethumbnail.sourceforge.net/ however this seems to be a Linux (and Windows) only tool. Is there anything else out there in ports or packages that could accomplish this? Any information would be greatly appreciated!


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## scottro (Oct 27, 2014)

I'm not sure if multimedia/tovid can do what you want, but I know I've used it to make menus of say, 5 shows with thumbnails.  I have a page with a brief overview of using it, with a link to better articles.  DISCLAIMER--I haven't used it in over a year, and when I did it was with Linux.  Also, making a menu (which is what is needed for thumbnails, I think) might require adding in each title by hand, but it can't hurt to look.


Blah, and I see, when I hit the link for the port, that it's apparently no longer maintained.  Sorry.  I'll leave this post up as it might be possible to still get it working, but I have no idea how much work would be involved.  Sorry, for what was probably a waste of your time.

A very cursory google indicates that you might be able to do this with ImageMagick.  
http://superuser.com/questions/599348/can-imagemagick-make-thumbnails-from-video.  Untested by me.


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## chrbr (Oct 30, 2014)

As far as I remember it should be possible to use multimedia/mplayer to extract a frame of a video and save it as an image. It might need a different tool to convert those images to a format you need for the thumbnails.


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