Looking for a way to preview video clips

[woody345]

Last year while surfing the web I stumbled across a program that would scan a video file and show screen caps at some interval so you could quickly preview the clip without using a video player. Sadly I can't find it anymore and have a rather large collection of home videos and downloaded video clips I want to sort through.

My computer is a bit slow and using something like VLC is slow and bogs down and the skipping is jerky and eratic so I hope someone can recommend a program like I mentioned above to let me see every 10-20 seconds of a clip rather than having to watch them all.

[MilesAhead]

AviDemux can handle many types of video. Once loaded there's a slider you can move to see still frames.

Also AvsPMod has a video preview. But you need to make a one line script to load the video like
DirectShowSource("Movie.ext")

with the name of the movie. That will load just about any type of video you can play on that PC.

[poisondeathray]

I think he is looking for a thumbnail maker that shows screenshots in a preview sheet, like mpchc, video thumbnail maker, imagegrabber 2 etc....

[woody345]

I think poisondeathray is correct, I just didn't know the terminology for a preview sheet. Still, the program I saw didn't actually make a image file, it just presented screenshots in a grid (5x3 or so) that you could quickly flip through to check the file contents. Anyways, now that I have a better feel for what I am looking for, perhaps I will be able to find it once again.

Thanks for the help guys.

[Hoser Rob]

I'm not quite sure that thumbnail/preview makers would be much faster on a slower machine.

The problem with vlc on slow computers is that as of version 2.0 they dropped the option to set up a cache for local file streams. That's a pretty serious omission if you ask me. On my i3 laptop with integrated intel graphics, which is middle of the road by modern standards, that really affects quality. I have vlc installed but I don't use it often.

If I were you I'd try smplayer, which is my default for video playback. You can set up a local file cache (8192Kb is a good setting) and it'll skip forward and back 10 seconds quite easily.

[hello_hello]

I'm not quite sure that thumbnail/preview makers would be much faster on a slower machine.
The problem with vlc on slow computers is that as of version 2.0 they dropped the option to set up a cache for local file streams.

No they didn't. They just moved it. If you installed the newer version of VLC over the top of the old one, chances are the setting's still the same. You can find it in the top-level category "Input / Codecs" in the advanced preferences. You'll probably have to scroll down to see it.

On my i3 laptop with integrated intel graphics, which is middle of the road by modern standards, that really affects quality. I have vlc installed but I don't use it often.

I don't know how caching would effect quality as such. Assuming the cache is just a "buffer", as long as the player's not dropping frames then quality should be the same with or without it. When playing video from a local hard drive, the hard drive should easily be able to keep up.
It sounds like you'd be better off using a media player which supports DXVA decoding using the i3 integrated graphics rather than the CPU. Assuming you're running Windows, I'm pretty sure MPC-HC does. Other than using DXVA, if the playback quality is lower using VLC than when using smplayer, I'd be looking for a different reason. Maybe there's an ffmpeg setting which needs tweaking, or it's to do with the players using different renderers etc.

If I were you I'd try smplayer, which is my default for video playback. You can set up a local file cache (8192Kb is a good setting) and it'll skip forward and back 10 seconds quite easily.

VLC has a "fast seek" option on the same preferences page as the cache settings. I haven't used VLC much so I don't know how it's "fast seek" works, but MPC-HC's "fast seek" option forces it to seek on keyframes so it doesn't have to spend time decoding frames around the seek position before it can start playing. Maybe SMPlayer does something similar by default.
It doesn't make sense to me that caching could speed up seeking because when you seek, if the player had to put video in the cache before it started playing every time, logically that'd slow seeking down, not speed it up, and the more it has to cache, the slower seeking would be.
The cache may help with skipping backwards or forwards a few seconds rather than with random seeking, but is that something people tend to do a lot?

[hello_hello]

My computer is a bit slow and using something like VLC is slow and bogs down and the skipping is jerky and eratic so I hope someone can recommend a program like I mentioned above to let me see every 10-20 seconds of a clip rather than having to watch them all.

MPC-HC will do something similar to what you describe. Using the File/Save Thumbnails menu it'll save a single jpg containing thumbnails of screenshots throughout the video. Then you can just open the jpg using an image viewing program. Something like Irfanview tends to open images fairly quickly.

I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing you're after but trying to improve seeking and fixing the stuttering might be preferable. What sort of video card does your computer have? If the video card supports hardware decoding then give MPC-HC a try (h264 decoding support is pretty standard for video cards these days). That way the video card will be decoding the video rather than the CPU and it should be better at it (ie faster) if you're using an old, slower CPU. If it's still a bit slow when seeking then try enabling MPC-HC's fast seek option.
My other half has a fairly middle of the road laptop, but with DXVA decoding it plays HD video just as well as my desktop and seems to seek just as quickly.

[woody345]

My computer is a bit slow and using something like VLC is slow and bogs down and the skipping is jerky and eratic so I hope someone can recommend a program like I mentioned above to let me see every 10-20 seconds of a clip rather than having to watch them all.

MPC-HC will do something similar to what you describe. Using the File/Save Thumbnails menu it'll save a single jpg containing thumbnails of screenshots throughout the video. Then you can just open the jpg using an image viewing program. Something like Irfanview tends to open images fairly quickly.

I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing you're after but trying to improve seeking and fixing the stuttering might be preferable. What sort of video card does your computer have? If the video card supports hardware decoding then give MPC-HC a try (h264 decoding support is pretty standard for video cards these days). That way the video card will be decoding the video rather than the CPU and it should be better at it (ie faster) if you're using an old, slower CPU. If it's still a bit slow when seeking then try enabling MPC-HC's fast seek option.
My other half has a fairly middle of the road laptop, but with DXVA decoding it plays HD video just as well as my desktop and seems to seek just as quickly.

My video card is ok for this sort of things (radeon 4850), the problem is trying to quickly skip through a video file that is 1-2 Gb in size where each skip causes a lockup of several seconds and the skips were not consistant as I was just clicking along the timeline. It really isn't that big a problem, just annoying while waiting for things to catch up plus the worry that the time from one click to the next might miss something I wish to save rather than deleting.

[hello_hello]

As far as I know the Radeon 4850 supports DXVA, so did you try MPC-HC? It'll display DXVA in the status bar when you begin playing if it's using DXVA. If seeking is still erratic, try the fast seek option, or switching renderers. Which version of Windows are you using?
I'm not an ATI user so I don't know much about their cards but it's a bit hard to offer suggestions without knowing what you've tried.