Requested feature overview description. I was thinking if it could be possible to have video posts to have a still image thumbnail of said video posts? I'll be using Gelbooru as an example of what I'm talking about. Of course there would have to be a way to tell the difference between video posts and other posts when looking at them in thumbnail view. I was thinking either an icon in a corner of the video thumbnail image or a border that e621 hasn't made/used yet.

Why would it be useful? Besides being easier to tell by looking at the thumbnail image of the video post I think this will be more helpful for smartphone users. What do I mean by that? I know that on PC when you hover your cursor over a post, a text box with tags, upload info, artist info, etc. shows up to describe the details of the post before clicking on it. I'm not sure if it's the same with consoles when browsing e621 on consoles, but I am certain that it's difficult to see the text box on smartphones, if possible.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected? I'd imagine that it would affect pages such as:
-pools
-sets
-comments
-posts
-wikis

That would be awesome, same for animated gif files, it would be cool to have a ''play'' icon on the corner of the thumbnail like DanBooru does, examples:

http://danbooru.donmai.us/posts?utf8=%E2%9C%93&tags=twistedgrim+&ms=1

I can't even count how many times this has been requested, both for flash and webm files, including me at least couple years ago and how sites like paheal are beating the e6 with this feature.

I can just hear Kira sob in the corner.

Here's threads I can find with single search:
forum #203241
forum #200873
forum #177422
forum #158612
forum #147833

blitzdrachin said:
That would be awesome, same for animated gif files, it would be cool to have a ''play'' icon on the corner of the thumbnail like DanBooru does, examples:

I'm guessing they have "animated gif" tag which triggers that small icon, because gifs do not have to be animated.

filetype:gif -animated

I do admit that it would make things much easier to be able to distinguish animated content from thumbnail, especially when webm files get the feature.

Mario69 said:

I do admit that it would make things much easier to be able to distinguish animated content from thumbnail, especially when webm files get the feature.

Yup, just to get more noticed and highlight from thumbnails of static images c:. It helps users to notices them better and also helps artists to get noticed.

I'll just throw in my perennial request for something other than just "Flash" on flashes. I know that flash thumbnails are non-trivial, but even just a substring of the md5 or similar would at least be helpful in finding a flash again, not to mention breaking up the sea of identical thumbnails you get when searching for a flash.

Same applies to webms, but for those it's much easier to get a representative thumbnail, especially if you start allowing animated thumbs like derpibooru (if you pull a few evenly spaced frames out of the video, you'll probably end up with something reasonably representative)

Regarding non-representative thumbnails, using something like identicons for flash would be pretty good -- it generates symbolic-seeming images from text. It seems to be implemented entirely in JS, so it may even be possible to trial it via a user extension.

Idk what's so hard about making WEBM thumbs...seems like every other booru that supports WEBMs was able to generate them from the get-go.

Dyrone said:
Idk what's so hard about making WEBM thumbs...seems like every other booru that supports WEBMs was able to generate them from the get-go.

It isn't hard. The problem is what exactly do you put in the thumbnail? You could go with the first frame but many animations start on a blank screen or can otherwise be misleading. You could pick a part in the middle but which part and who gets to decide?

BlueDingo said:
It isn't hard. The problem is what exactly do you put in the thumbnail? You could go with the first frame but many animations start on a blank screen or can otherwise be misleading. You could pick a part in the middle but which part and who gets to decide?

A blank screen is no more or less helpful than the thumbnails we already have, and there are also plenty of animations that feature relevant content on their first frame.

Strikerman said:
A blank screen is no more or less helpful than the thumbnails we already have, and there are also plenty of animations that feature relevant content on their first frame.

This.
And it's as easy to happen with gif files as well: misleading_thumbnail animated

If we want to get fancy, nobody is stopping anyone from creating multiple thumbs which start cycling once mouse hover. But even just getting first frame helps a looot even if some small precentage of material turns out black/white or othervice unuseable and with those we have earlier mentioned tag.

And I'm getting huge deja vu feelings here as I'm certain I have explained this exact same thing already several times now.

IMO it wouldn't be too hard to filter out literally blank frames anyway (check the number of colors in the image).
If you wanted to get slightly fancier you could also check entropy value (ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick), which is a reasonably good measure of how much discernible details are in the frame. Pick 4 random frames from animation, check their entropy, use the frame with highest value as thumbnail.

savageorange said:
Pick 4 random frames from animation, check their entropy, use the frame with highest value as thumbnail.

First quarter of the video should be prioritized since later frames are more likely to be spoilers for some videos.

PornHub also does animated thumbnails.

So I'll +1 for this.

I don't know from a programming point of view how hard it is, but it is possible, and that's all that matters!

Snowy said:
I'll just throw in my perennial request for something other than just "Flash" on flashes.

savageorange said:
Regarding non-representative thumbnails, using something like identicons for flash would be pretty good -- it generates symbolic-seeming images from text.

I have created a userscript that does this: forum #238223