Will be added flash preview? I use this site many years and I hoped that it will evolve, but there is no features of it, because I saw sites with flash previwe along ago that i meet this, its wery upset :c I searched in profile settings and cant find nothing like that, still hoping that admins will correct it.

Can such a thing be implemented or auto-generated in anyway?

we have feature request thread for reason

fox_whisper85 said:
Can such a thing be implemented or auto-generated in anyway?

I found a solution online that looks promising, no idea if it will work though.

I added animation previews to the feature request thread last month. I think it's a great idea!

Yeah -1 here, shouldn't be any animated previews. Makes it easier to find flashes when searching for animated art and it makes it less surprising when you open up a flash and it's something fuckin weird

Trying to find a flash (especially trying to find one again) is terrible on this site. Fuck the sea of completely identical thumbnails. I'm sure we could overlay a "FLASH" watermark or something on the preview, but what we have right now is intolerable.

Snowy said:
Trying to find a flash (especially trying to find one again) is terrible on this site. Fuck the sea of completely identical thumbnails. I'm sure we could overlay a "FLASH" watermark or something on the preview, but what we have right now is intolerable.

Supply us with an easy solution we can implement and we will implement it.

It isn't that we don't care about it, it's the issue that actual implementation is pretty hard to automate properly since flash is literally a bitch.

I understand that Flash is a bitch, and making thumbnails is no easy task for it, but how about webm? That must be so much easier to do and we have plenty of them here now.

Tuvalu said:
how about webm? That must be so much easier to do and we have plenty of them here now.

That seems like a much easier project for me to start on; added to my list.

NotMeNotYou said:
Supply us with an easy solution we can implement and we will implement it.

Add the ability to upload a custom thumbnail for webm's and swf's, and add "Flash" or "Video" in the lower right hand corner of the thumbnail.

This has been suggested several times before...

• forum #27676

forum #37214
forum #37249
forum #41197
forum #58692
forum #83724
forum #121364
forum #158612
forum #164403
forum #168217
forum #177422

ShylokVakarian said:
Add the ability to upload a custom thumbnail for webm's and swf's, and add "Flash" or "Video" in the lower right hand corner of the thumbnail.

Since any auto-thumbnailing of Flash will be, at best, a fragile hack (it's an interactive system with a Turing-complete language (ActionScript) controlling it).. I think this is the most practical suggestion. It's a little abusable, so I guess we would need another FFD reason 'misleading thumbnail'. Still, worthwhile IMO. Personally I just don't click on Flash currently, because I have no idea what's in them, and tags don't help that much.

parasprite said:
That seems like a much easier project for me to start on; added to my list.

Best of luck on that! A site I worked on a while back used ffmpeg and that was pretty easy, but I have no idea if that'll work with webm and RoR.

NotMeNotYou said:
Supply us with an easy solution we can implement and we will implement it.

It isn't that we don't care about it, it's the issue that actual implementation is pretty hard to automate properly since flash is literally a bitch.

That post was a response to someone saying that there shouldn't be previews for swfs. I'm not saying that you don't care about it. I know that it's a difficult problem.

That said, I really do think that the current situation is intolerable, and pretty much anything would be an improvement. Even slapping the last few digits of the md5 on the thumbnail would be better than what we've got (it would help with finding a particular flash again, and help with the "where the hell was I?" effect that arises from the sea of identical thumbnails that you get when searching for flashes).

parasprite said:
That seems like a much easier project for me to start on; added to my list.

since webm is a video format, perhaps something i've seen on several...nsfw sites might work. that being a thumbnail that shows a few (5or so) random frames from the video when the mouse cursor is over it.

perhaps something like that could work for flash thumbnails as well?

Snowy said:

That said, I really do think that the current situation is intolerable, and pretty much anything would be an improvement. Even slapping the last few digits of the md5 on the thumbnail would be better than what we've got (it would help with finding a particular flash again, and help with the "where the hell was I?" effect that arises from the sea of identical thumbnails that you get when searching for flashes).

I was actually thinking about giving it a strip of color based on the post ID, but that still seems like a bit of a crutch. :/

I'll see what I can come up with.

treos said:
since webm is a video format, perhaps something i've seen on several...nsfw sites might work. that being a thumbnail that shows a few (5or so) random frames from the video when the mouse cursor is over it.

perhaps something like that could work for flash thumbnails as well?

It's mostly getting the thumbnails that's the problem. It's easy for webm, partially because it's an open format, and partially because the video doesn't have to be rendered in realtime (like flash does).

parasprite said:
I was actually thinking about giving it a strip of color based on the post ID, but that still seems like a bit of a crutch. :/

I think that using a few bytes from the hash would work better. It would provide a wider variation. This is the same reason I suggested overlaying part of the hash instead of overlaying the ID - the wider variation makes it easy to remember well enough to distinguish between posts, and is also easier to recognize in a page of similar results.

As for it being a crutch...yes, it is. But I'd rather walk around with a crutch than do nothing while I wait for my leg to heal.

Snowy said:
I think that using a few bytes from the hash would work better. It would provide a wider variation. This is the same reason I suggested overlaying part of the hash instead of overlaying the ID - the wider variation makes it easy to remember well enough to distinguish between posts, and is also easier to recognize in a page of similar results.

Oh, right. I forgot the posts next to each other would most likely be similar in number and would just make an equally ambiguous gradient. That would be a problem. :x

md5 it is then.

NotMeNotYou said:
Supply us with an easy solution we can implement and we will implement it.

It isn't that we don't care about it, it's the issue that actual implementation is pretty hard to automate properly since flash is literally a bitch.

If the web server uses a python backend/can use python scripts, I could probably write something to dump the first frame of a flash video.
But yes, flash is a bitch to mess with.

memeboy said:
Yeah -1 here, shouldn't be any animated previews. Makes it easier to find flashes when searching for animated art and it makes it less surprising when you open up a flash and it's something fuckin weird

The first part of your comment is exactly why we have the following meta tags:
flash
gif
filetype:webm
animated

...and to be fair, I have doubts a lot of people here are masochists

mrnotsosafeforwork said:
The first part of your comment is exactly why we have the following meta tags:
flash
gif
filetype:webm
animated

gif is aliased to animated. Use filetype:gif instead.