How to generate thumbnails from uploaded video?

In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate thumbnails from a video file.

Warning!!! Please use small video files only, if your machine is low-end.

We will primarily use the fluent-ffmpeg library to perform the action.

For this, download the ffmpeg library from the official site of ffmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/.

Extract the zip and add the bin folder to your environment variables path.

Steps

1. Create a folder for the conversion, name it as video-thumbnail-generator.




2. Initialize it as a Node.js package.

   npm init -y




3. Install the fluent-ffmpeg library

   npm install fluent-ffmpeg




4. Import the library

   const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg')




5. The first argument of ffmpeg will be the path to the video file

   ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')




6. Take a screenshot and save it to the folder

   ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')
   
     .screenshots({
   
        count: 1,
   
        filename: 'thumbnail-%s.png',
   
        folder: 'output_path/'
   
     })

Entire Code

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg')


ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')

  .on('filenames', (filenames) => {

     console.log(filenames.join(', '))

  })

  .on('end', () => {

     console.log('Screenshots taken!')

  })

  .screenshots({

     count: 1,

     filename: 'thumbnail-%s.png',

     folder: 'output_path/'

  })