Is anyone aware of an app that previews video files, i.e. by showing thumbnails, with or without an embedded player?

Running KDE4, the preview setting in Dolphin is very, very slow to render usable icons (even on my reasonably fast / beefy system) and I'm wondering if there isn't something better than the preview modes of file managers in general.

I STFW already and couldn't find anything - there are plenty of picture viewers and plenty of video players, but I couldn't find any video previewers. The closest thing seems to be mplayerthumbs, but if I'm not mistaken, that's just the preview mode built in to Dolphin.

Well, there is ffmpegthumbnailer but that is not guaranteed to work with all types of video. I use the totem-thumbnail function which is integrated into nautilus but that won't be much help since you are a KDE user.

You might consider creating custom thumbs using (sm)player. Smplayer has a GUI preview function that will build jpegs that contain multiple screenshots neatly lined up in rows and colums. It is just a front-end to mplayer so it should be possible to do the same from the command line or from a script. But those previews are just that, not thumbnails; you'd have to do some extra work to use them as click-and-play icons.

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Yeah, not exactly what I was looking for, but I suspect that what I was looking for doesn't exist.

That said, smplayer is a really nice front-end to mplayer I hadn't seen before, and that preview function is really useful. Thanks for the tip!

Hallo,
there's a ready solution - kffmpegthumbnailer
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php...content=117562
It's KDE application and I'm using it for some time now. It's even included in Fedora's repositories. And it's fast too.