ROX-Filer video thumbnails

I recently received an email from Rick, reminding me that he would very much like if ROX supports video thumbnails. I vaguely recall, someone else on the forum also made this request. Personally, I had no interest, so let it slide, until now.

How to do it is described in the original ROX User Manual:

https://rox.sourceforge.net/Manual/Manual/Manual.html#id2504872

However, we found that it doesn't work. We have discussed the problem in the forum, and we found that the Jun7 fork of ROX does work, but the original source, the woof-CE source, and my own fork of ROX in woofQ2, do not. Forum member Burunduk found the reason, that the .png thumbnails need metadata:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=16991

Excellent, but I found that my fork used in EasyOS still doesn't work; which narrowed down to a particular source patch. Took out the patch, and now works. We will examine that patch sometime in the future. Anyway, now working in EasyOS:

ROX looks for scripts in /etc/xdg/rox.sourceforge.net/MIME-thumb to generate the thumbnails.

For example, script 'video_mp4':

#!/bin/sh
# $1-path to source, $2-path to output, $3-pixel size 
exec ffmpegthumbnailer -i "${1}" -s ${3} -t 10 -q 8 -a -m -o ${2}

...ffmpegthumbnailer is a little binary executable, available via PKGget. All of this will be in the next release of Easy.

This is a nice feature to have. We are on a roll recently, improving ROX, so this is one more.   

Tags: easy