Thumbnail views of video files

[Roger49]

Several years ago my TC displayed thumbnails of some video formats, probably with the help of XnView or Irfanview.

Now I cannot get TC to show thumbnails of any video files.

I wish somebody could write a plugin which helps TC to show thumbnails of the most common video formats, primarily .flv which is by far the most common video format, but also for .mpeg .wmv .avi etc..

It would be a good idea to chose an image from the middle of the video, or image 50, because many videos start with one or more black frames.

Any tips for displaying thumbnails of video files using other programs are also welcome.

[Roger49]

I forgot to mention that I use Windows Vista Home something, but of course it is good if we can find a solution which works on as many operating systems as possible.

Maybe I used Windows 2000 when video thumbnails worked for some formats. I had to change computer with my sister when she bought a Vista computer, so I could help her much easier, because she now has a computer I have used for many years. I had to learn Vista, which was a little problem but it works fairly well now.

[Roger49]

I have now installed latest version of Irfanview, and its thumbnail view part can show thumbs of all my video formats in folders containing video files.

So I tried setting TC to use this ability. I made sure the settings for the thumbnail view was set to use XnView slash Irfanview. I also replaced *.* with *.flv *.wmv *.mpeg *.avi *.mpg in the field to the right of this setting. It didn't work. So I also un-ticked the two settings above this line, which tells TC to use its own viewer for *.* and the next line which says use the Explorer method (OLE2) for *.* | *.htm *.html. And I restarted TC. It still doesn't work.

I am using the latest version of TC, 7.56a.

The only positive result of this is that I have found a program, Irfanview, which can show thumbs of .flv files as well as .wmv .mpg and .mpeg files, but I would, of course want to get the thumbnail view in TC to make use of this ability in Irfanview.

[Roger49]

I continued to search for reasons why it doesn't work. I found that I had a thumbs plugin in the lister section so I deleted it, thinking that TC tried to use that instead of Irfanview, and restarted TC. Still didn't work.

I checked that the line in wincmd.ini which sets the path to Irfanview was correct. IViewPath=E:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe
so it was correct. Tried also to use the path as E:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe /thumbs as it says in the path to the thumbnail view part of Irfanview. Still no success.

Searched through wincmd.ini for XnView, it doesn't exist, so TC is probably not trying to use XnView instead of Irfanview.

[Roger49]

Continued exploration. I have three pictures in the same folder as the videos, one .bmp one .jpg one .png. All three pictures are shown correctly as thumbs. But the built-in viewer in TC can only show .bmp pictures, so TC is obviously using Irfanview to get thumbs for the other two pictures.

In the help file, thumbnail section, I found this: "Get from Irfan-/Xnview for
This method can use an installed (and configured as a filter in Lister) Irfanview or Xnview to load the images. The image is loaded as a whole, passed to Total Commander via the clipboard, and then reduced to the thumbnail size. "

So it is not enough to make the settings for thumbnails correctly, I have to make the settings for Edit/View correctly too. But I don't know what the correct settings for Irfanview as a filter in the viewer are.

By the way, I uninstalled XnView from my computer. I never use it anyway so I can just as well exclude the possibility that TC is trying to use it for video thumbs.

So the question is what "(and configured as a filter in Lister) Irfanview" means?

[donector]

for god's sake!!
..nobody has a piece od advice for this!!!

[iana]

install this
http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/FileThumbs.html
and read this
http://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?p=207228