43

I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I've manually installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Everything looks fine except video thumbnails. How to solve this?

David Foerster
  • 36,264
  • 56
  • 94
  • 147
Vikas
  • 513
  • 1
  • 4
  • 6
  • Did you choose the "minimal installation" option instead of "normal installation" as shown here: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/the-ubuntu-minimal-install-option.jpg? – pomsky May 10 '18 at 18:15
  • I choose normal installation. – Vikas May 11 '18 at 07:51
  • Upgraded to ubuntu 18.04 from 16.04 recently, same issue no thumbnails in my list view of folders and never checked icon view. I did everything except for some commonsense then bumped on following https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/8di3ce/no_file_thumbnails_in_1804_list_view/ and that seems to be my issue, icon view thumbnails always work and in list view I need to zoom to 150%. – shyam Sep 14 '18 at 05:47

6 Answers6

75

Install FFMPEG Thumbnailer-

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then close and reopen file manager. Thumbnails for most video files should generate now.

However, if it's still not working then open file manager, go to your home folder if you're not already there (Home folder is usually the folder which contains Downloads, Documents, Photos etc folders).

Press Ctrl+H, enter into the folder named .cache. Then enter in the folder thumbnails.
Delete everything in there. Restart your PC.

abu_bua
  • 10,783
HattinGokbori87
  • 1,665
  • 2
    No need to restart my PC; quitting and restarting Nautilus was enough – smac89 Apr 17 '19 at 02:32
  • 3
    Alternatively you can run-

    rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

    in Terminal to clear the thumbnail cache.

     – HattinGokbori87 Apr 24 '20 at 07:42
  • 3
    already installed. in my case, some mp4 files have thumbnails, others do not. file size limit is 4096MB, which is larger than any of my files... – Michael May 27 '20 at 18:38
  • 4
    Installing ffmpegthumbnailer works for Ubuntu 20.04. Thumbnails were displayed immediately in the Nautilus window that was already opened. – Daniel Jan 01 '21 at 17:23
  • This worked for me on Arch as well with PCManFM with just a restart of it. – Kevin Apr 23 '21 at 00:51
  • Did this with nautilus closed, then opened it after installation, worked perfectly. Thank you. – Juan M Jul 09 '21 at 15:59
  • I had to disable the totem thumbnailer in the /usr/share/thumbnailers to make it work. – Tooster Apr 17 '23 at 15:08
  • 3
    Didn't work for me (Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS x86_64 ) – Mehdi Charife Apr 26 '23 at 22:13
  • @HattinGokbori87 Hey your trick for clearing out the thumbnail cache, thanks, that's a nice trick I keep coming back to it time and time again. I hope you post that more often so more people can be exposed to it, it's so much easier than manually clearing out the thumbnail cache you know what I'm sayin'? – Cool124 Jun 19 '23 at 22:52
49

I have tried HattinGokbori87's solution but it failed, and I found another way to solve it.

First I installed the HattinGokbori87's suggested package like this:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then I restarted the computer but I still could not see the video's thumbnails in the file manager, so I tried to install another package like this:

sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav

Then cleaned up the directory like this:

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail

Then reopen the file manager, it works!

Refer to this article if your Ubuntu 18.04 thumbnails still do not work.

Update: For Ubuntu 20.04 this method still works (I just upgraded my computer operating system from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 20.04).

Update (2023-2-8): For Ubuntu 22.04 and Pop!_OS 22.04, this method still works.

Riko
  • 620
1

Install following packages

ffmpeg,ffmpegthumbnailer,gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg ffmpegthumbnailer gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Then edit the following file with respective content

sudo vi /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer

just paste the following lines

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10
MimeType=application/mxf;application/ogg;application/ram;application/sdp;application/vnd.ms-wpl;application/vnd.rn-realmedia;application/x-extension-m4a;application/x-extension-mp4;application/x-flash-video;application/x-matroska;application/x-netshow-channel;application/x-ogg;application/x-quicktimeplayer;application/x-shorten;image/vnd.rn-realpix;image/x-pict;misc/ultravox;text/x-google-video-pointer;video/3gpp;video/dv;video/fli;video/flv;video/mp2t;video/mp4;video/mp4v-es;video/mpeg;video/msvideo;video/ogg;video/quicktime;video/vivo;video/vnd.divx;video/vnd.rn-realvideo;video/vnd.vivo;video/webm;video/x-anim;video/x-avi;video/x-flc;video/x-fli;video/x-flic;video/x-flv;video/x-m4v;video/x-matroska;video/x-mpeg;video/x-ms-asf;video/x-ms-asx;video/x-msvideo;video/x-ms-wm;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-ms-wmx;video/x-ms-wvx;video/x-nsv;video/x-ogm+ogg;video/x-theora+ogg;video/x-totem-stream;audio/x-pn-realaudio;audio/3gpp;audio/ac3;audio/AMR;audio/AMR-WB;audio/basic;audio/midi;audio/mp2;audio/mp4;audio/mpeg;audio/ogg;audio/prs.sid;audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;audio/x-aiff;audio/x-ape;audio/x-flac;audio/x-gsm;audio/x-it;audio/x-m4a;audio/x-matroska;audio/x-mod;audio/x-mp3;audio/x-mpeg;audio/x-ms-asf;audio/x-ms-asx;audio/x-ms-wax;audio/x-ms-wma;audio/x-musepack;audio/x-pn-aiff;audio/x-pn-au;audio/x-pn-wav;audio/x-pn-windows-acm;audio/x-realaudio;audio/x-real-audio;audio/x-sbc;audio/x-speex;audio/x-tta;audio/x-wav;audio/x-wavpack;audio/x-vorbis;audio/x-vorbis+ogg;audio/x-xm;application/x-flac;

and finally restart your machine and see.

Smart Athiyas
  • 54
1

I think there's a bug either in totem-video-thumbnailer or GStreamer.

When you search for solutions, many of them suggest ffmpegthumbnailer.

I can't say whether it's a better, or a worse thumbnailer, but installing it did work for me.

The only caveat is that you seem to have to configure configure things to override the system default. I couldn't find what the default processing order is for conflicting thumbnailers in the same directory, but thumbnailers in ~/.local/share/thumbnailers appear to take precedence over /usr/share/thumbnailers

Creating a link solved my problem:

ln -s /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

A couple of notes:

  1. Here is an excellent answer with a swag of background about how thumbnailing hangs together

  2. You may quit nautilus/nemo by running them with the -q flag

    $nautilus -q
$nemo -q

  3. Deleting the contents of ~/.cache/thumbnails causes thumbnails to be rebuilt the next time they are needed

Glorfindel
  • 971
  • 3
  • 13
  • 20
Aaron
  • 527
0

Use ffmpeg by creating a thumbnailer entry that invokes ffmpeg. The thumbnailer will run for MIME types video/mp4 and video/webm, but additional types can be added as desired.

sudo apt install ffmpeg 
echo -e "[Thumbnailer Entry]\nTryExec=ffmpeg\nExec=ffmpeg -i %i -vf thumbnail,scale=\"256:-1\" -frames:v 1 %o\nMimeType=video/mp4;video/webm" | sudo tee /usr/share/thumbnailers/custom-ffmpeg.thumbnailer
rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*
nohup nautilus -q > /dev/null &
Dan Watkins
  • 101
-1

I followed HattinGokbori87's instructions above, that is:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then delete thumbnail cache and restart

This fixed my issue, which was that only some mp4 files have thumbnails. However, it also removed existing mpeg thumbnails.

So, I remove ffmpegthumbnailer:

sudo apt remove ffmpegthumbnailer

Then delete thumbnail cache and restart

And it works, I guess all I really needed to do was delete the cache and restart.

Tye
  • 11