mkv (and other formats) screenshot thumbnails in Finder

[muitommy]

thanks.. but,
what do you mean cannot play?
the fact is i can play the mov in vista with media player classic,
maybe there're some problems with your installed codec

 

[maclovin']

Any new news on this yet? I noticed this is kind of an old thread and I was wondering if there has been a solution since the last post. It's not a big deal, but my movies stack would look a whole lot nicer without this one mkv file.

 

[Cave Man]

The solution is to use Plex (although not for the Finder).

 

[maclovin']

The solution is to use Plex (although not for the Finder).

How does that answer the question at all? I just downloaded it, and it doesn't seem like a bad alternative to Front Row, but it doesn't fix the problem of having no icon preview for mkv files.

 

[ironjaw]

And oh btw

Don't use quicktime to "save as a self contained movie".

I tried one mkv file and it couldn't play the audio, so I'm still doing the .mov reference only for iTunes so I can see all the organized movies I have - I still prefer and use Plex for watching though

 

[muitommy]

that could be a good idea to save a reference movie unless u don't move around the files. and that would be cool if i can batch to save it all, cus it's troublesome to open it one by one. cus i have quite a number of mkv files.

 

[l0ckd0wn]

a manual solution that worked for me: open *.mkv file in Quicktime Player ( with Perian installed) and let it load completely. Choose the screenshot via slider in Quicktime and Edit > Copy, switch to Finder > File Info and paste over existing thumbnail

 

[ohkuipo]

Raising an old thread for the curious..... is the best (and seemingly only) solution still what l0dockown posted above?

 

[applejockey]

I have the same problem with my .flv files....

a manual solution that worked for me: open *.mkv file in Quicktime Player ( with Perian installed) and let it load completely. Choose the screenshot via slider in Quicktime and Edit > Copy, switch to Finder > File Info and paste over existing thumbnail

So far this seems to be the only way.


I recently asked a similar question on another board and here was the most detailed reply
Someone posted this on another board though I have yet to try it though as im not very verse in automator and scripting

Aug 23, 2009, 05:13 PM

I created an Automator script that converted my movie from format x[\I] to FLV then created a poster frame. Basically, it used ffmpeg, which is a free command line utility. You cannot find the binary to download, but if you download ffmpegx and look inside the package you can extract the pre-compiled ffmpeg binary which works without the shareware GUI wrapper (e.g. ffmpegx). I am in my BootCamp so I don't have access to my Automator script (to extract the command line to generate the poster frame) but it's easy to Google that part/.
Here's the arguments I use to generate a poster frame using ffmpeg in the command line (but called in Automator):

Code:

for f in "$@"
do
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$f" -an -ss 00:00:03 -t 00:00:01 -r 1 -y -s 320x240 /Users/craig/Desktop/video%d.jpg
done

Raising an old thread for the curious..... is the best (and seemingly only) solution still what l0dockown posted above?

Im resurrecting this thread too.It's hard to believe the only way to do this is thru copy past...
I have hundreds of files from youtube ...

 

[section.echo]

Download the Xvid Codec....

Problem Solved, this mill make *Most* avi, mkv, mov...Really doe's not matter if it is associated with quicktime, vlc..whatever....

You can find the codec here:
http://n.ethz.ch/student/naegelic/download/

 

[jmh600cbr]

will this work in lion?

Problem Solved, this mill make *Most* avi, mkv, mov...Really doe's not matter if it is associated with quicktime, vlc..whatever....

You can find the codec here:
http://n.ethz.ch/student/naegelic/download/

does this actually work to show thumbnails?

 

[wikus]

does this actually work to show thumbnails?

Its a link to download the XviD component. Which won't help for MKV thumbnail previews.

I'm pretty bummed about this for a few reasons;

I use Handbrake to encode all of my movies. If I set the container to .m4v with high profile (trellis off being the only modification) I am unable to fast forward using my Western Digital TV. If I use the same encoder settings but using the .mkv container, it works fine on my WDTV and the playback is quicker than in m4v when playing it back via VLC on the computer.

The trade off is that mkv shows no thumbnails in OS X 10.6.8, while all m4v files do. While the thumbnails are nice to have, the question is; is it really worth it? Most of the thumbnails display a frame thats a few seconds into the movie. Knowing what most of us use these formats for, this is what basically all the thumbnails end up looking like;

It's not very exciting or even helpful seeing either a black box of nothing or a preview of the studio's intro/logo.

I do have a question though;

If I install Perian to support MKV playback and set VLC as my default application to open all MKV files, will it at least enable 'Quick Look' ?

 

[unl0cker]

Works fine here under Lion .4

Sometimes is best to leave the icon size to 64. Dunno why always work here.

Also try to force the creation by downsizing the window and scrolling the icons up and down.