Can I change thumbnail pictures?

[Loubear]

I know windows supposedly takes a shot of the first frame in a video, but what really confused me is that the wmv's preloaded by microsoft onto my zune have thumbnails that are nowhere in the videos themselves. Which leads me to think that I might be able to change them.

Here's a screenshot to show the thumbnails. Are they located in metadata or something? Or is there some other trick to change video thumbnails?

[redwudz]

WMV video may be different, but I have inserted one frame at the beginning of a AVI type video and it doesn't show at playback but does show up as a thumbnail in Explorer. Probably doesn't show for playback as it's only ~1/30 of a second in duration.

But others may have some better ideas for WMV or other formats.

And welcome to our forums.

[Loubear]

What software did you use? Did you have to reencode the video after cutting it?

[redwudz]

I used VirtualDub. I loaded a Xvid that showed the icon as a black screen in Windows Explorer:



VD showed the same black screen as the first frame:



I used the VD keyframe button to move ahead in the video until I found a title screen:



Then I used the VD 'Mark in' key to mark the keyframe. Then the right arrow keyboard key to move forward one frame. Then the VD 'Mark out' key to mark the selection. Then I used the 'Video>Cut' from the menu to make the selection. Then I moved back to the beginning of the video and pasted the frame I had cut. Finally, I selected 'Direct steam copy' and saved the modified video.

The videos icon now showed the first frame with the title I had inserted:



Anyway, that's how I have done it in the past. May be easier ways, but that worked for me.

[jagabo]

WMP gets its thumbnails from MS's web site and puts them in the metadata files that accompany the WMV files.

In WMP note: Tools -> Options -> Library -> "Retrieve additional information from the Internet"

[vktRus]

Try it (attached file). Thumbnail (custom frame) for AVI, MPG, MPE, MPEG, MPG, WMV, MKV etc.
(Matroska Splitter + reg-hack)

thumbnail_enable_custom_frame.zip