Hello,
I am using openSUSE 10.3.I play my video files using mplayer which I installed from tarball & necessary codecs.I can play my video files from command line nicely.Only one problem there are no thumbnail of any video file.Does anybody which software should I install so that thumbnail appear for video file in my nautilus file browser.The default player for GNOME desktop environment is totem which require internet connection to play file while my computer has no internet connection that is why I don't do anything with totem as it always says particular codec needed to play any audio or video file.

Thumbnails are created by totem. If you don't want/need totem, you can install ffmpegthumbnailer as an alternative; it works well but does not seem capable of handling all the formats that totem can.

to jay73,
I unzipped the ffmpeg-checkout-snapshot.tar.bz2 in /home/lxuser then did ./configure,make & make install and no errors occured.

When I ./configure for ffmpegthumbnailer then following error occurs

checking for FFMPEG... no
configure: error: +Could not find ffmpeg. Please update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to point at location of ffmpeg pkgconfig files directory.

when I run ffmpeg i get following output
FFmpeg version SVN-r17747, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration:
libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0
libavcodec 52.20. 0 / 52.20. 0
libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0
libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
built on Mar 3 2009 22:17:16, gcc: 4.2.1 (SUSE Linux)
At least one output file must be specified

So what Should I do?

Try running export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=path_to_ffmpeg_pkgconfig before ./configure (you'll need to determine the exact path yourself, I cannot help you there).

As mentioned before I had extracted ffmpeg tarball in directory /home/lxuser/.
so configure file is present in /home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03
then I ran
export PKG_CONFIG=/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03
echo $PKG_CONFIG --to verify
./configure still gave this error

checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... ./configure: line 15989: /home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03: is a directory
no
checking for FFMPEG... configure: error: +Could not find ffmpeg. Please update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to point at location of ffmpeg pkgconfig files directory.

Where I am going wrong?

Pkg_config_path

Edit: the above needs to be all uppercase; for some reason uppercase gets converted to lowercase when my message is submitted. ????

AS YOU HAVE SAID i DID
linux-goap:/home/lxuser/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0 #export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03"
linux-goap:/home/lxuser/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0 # echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH
STILL NOW
./configure of ffmpegthumbnailer gave following error
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03
checking for FFMPEG... no
configure: error: +Could not find ffmpeg. Please update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to point at location of ffmpeg pkgconfig files directory.
QUESTION
I have given the path of folder where I unzipped the tarball.
I also tried export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/bin".Still error remains.

I am using openSUSE 10.3.
I have extracted ffmpeg tarball in /home/lxuser/ffmpeg-0.5/ directory and installed it successfully.
here is the error I get when I run "./configure" for ffmpegthumbnailer

checking for FFMPEG... no
configure: error: +Could not find ffmpeg. Please update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to point at location of ffmpeg pkgconfig files directory.
QUESTION
What should I give in PKG_CONFIG_PATH for thumbnailer.
NOTE
(1)I have tried export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-0.5
(2)I have tried export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PATH

I am asking the above question again titled 'asking everybody'.
PLEASE somebody give an answer.

Check /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib to find out whether a pc file was created during compilation.

/usr/lib & /usr/local/lib contain lot of .pc files but none of them start with ff
The folder in which ffmpeg tarball was extracted has
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavcodec/libavcodec.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavcodec/libavcodec-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavformat/libavformat.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavformat/libavformat-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavfilter/libavfilter-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavfilter/libavfilter.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libswscale/libswscale.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libswscale/libswscale-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavutil/libavutil-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavutil/libavutil.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavdevice/libavdevice.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavdevice/libavdevice-uninstalled.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libpostproc/libpostproc.pc
/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libpostproc/libpostproc-uninstalled.pc
So I gave following command
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavcodec:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavformat:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavfilter:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavutil:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libswscale:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libavdevice:/home/lxuser/ffmpeg-checkout-2009-03-03/libpostproc
Then make './configure' gave no error but 'make' gave following error
moviedecoder.cpp:28:28: error: ffmpeg/swscale.h: No such file or directory
moviedecoder.cpp: In member function ‘void MovieDecoder::convertAndScaleFrame(int, int, bool, int&, int&)’:
moviedecoder.cpp:306: error: ‘SwsContext’ was not declared in this scope
moviedecoder.cpp:306: error: ‘scaleContext’ was not declared in this scope
moviedecoder.cpp:308: error: ‘SWS_BICUBIC’ was not declared in this scope
moviedecoder.cpp:308: error: ‘sws_getContext’ was not declared in this scope
moviedecoder.cpp:320: error: ‘sws_scale’ was not declared in this scope
moviedecoder.cpp:321: error: ‘sws_freeContext’ was not declared in this scope
make[2]: *** [moviedecoder.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/lxuser/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0/src/libffmpegthumbnailer'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/lxuser/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.3.0/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

Is that a brand new version of ffmpeg you downloaded. Looking at the error messages, I get the impression that it is a coding issue.

ASKING EVERYBODY
Can anybody tell me the version of ffmpegthumbnailer which you have installed & had no problem also tell the value of variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH alongwith the version of ffmpeg you installed.

Just a thought, did you enabled preview in nautilus ?

Actually
I have installed ffmpeg successfully but there is no file called ffmpeg.pc but there are few .pc files in extracted tarball so I gave them in PKG_CONFIG_PATH and './configure' reported no errors but make gave errors told above.