nodejs get mp4 file thumbnail quickly

Question

I want to have a thumbnail of 0.0 sec of a video. Currently I am using node-fluent-ffmpeg to generate thumbnail. Following is the code:

ffmpeg(tempLocalFile)
          .screenshots({
            timestamps: [0.0],
            filename: 'xx.png',
            folder: tempFilePath
          }).on('end', function() {
            console.log('done');
          });

But the problem is, it is taking too much of time to do the process. It is normally taking 30sec to generate the thumbnail. Which keeps increasing if the mp4 file size increases.

So my question is, Is there any fast way to generate the thumbnail. Can we improve above code to improve the performance.

ps: The machine this code is running is 512MB RAM 800MHz

800MHz is the speed of the processor? Use a faster machine :) — posit labs, Aug 24 '17 at 19:21
I upgraded to 2.5GHz machine.. It takes less it now.. But not production level. Is there any alternative library/method.. Which i can use? — user1590595, Aug 25 '17 at 00:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 28 '17 at 22:51

There is a trick to make ffmpeg only decode a single frame. You simply define the -ss flag before the input. That will force it to only decode the specified frame, as opposed to the whole video.

ffmpeg -ss 0 -i input.mp4 -vframes 1 output.jpg

I'm not sure how this could be done in fluent-ffmpeg, or if it's even possible. You could file an issue

nodejs get mp4 file thumbnail quickly

1 Answers1