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Video thumbnails simply stopped showing. I still get the PDFs and images thumbnails, but the video ones are no longer showing.

Screenshot of icons

I've already tried everything I found in Google, but nothing works.

Could anyone help me with this?

Here's what I've already tried from what I could get in other topics/forums:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer
sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad
rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails

Then I restarted the pc.

I also tried:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.thumbnails
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.cache/thumbnails
sudo rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/* ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

Restarted PC.

That's all the help I could find, but it's still not working.

pomsky
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Dj Quaresma
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3 Answers3

5

I had a similar issue. There is an article on Hectic Geek about how to set ffmpegthumbnailer as the default thumbnail viewer for video. It's not enough to install the package. However, you don't need to overwrite the totem.thumbnailer file either, just edit the TryExec and Exec lines (sudo -H gedit /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer):

TryExec=/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f

Leave the rest of the file as-is. After this, you may need to close your file browser and delete the thumbnail cache for it to take effect.

Eliah Kagan
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user413722
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3

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 would advise against modifying anything in /usr because it may be overwritten during an update. By the time that happens you will have forgotten whatever the hell it was that you did to fix that thumbnail thing that was going on ages ago that you seem to think is similar to your current problem.

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
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Aaron
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2

Sorry for my English go to preview home folder, Edit-> Preferences-> Preview then make it Always under show thumbnails than only for file smaller than make it at lest 16BB Done.

saeed
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    I've seen someone giving that solution too, but Nautilus doesn't have the menu with those options anymore.

    Thanks for trying to help, though.

     – Dj Quaresma Feb 19 '19 at 23:53