Thumbnail Appearing as a Black Screen

[zsumie]

Tested with multiple different video sources, and versions

[cdgriffith]

It is currently based off the "start" position of the video. So if the video starts with a black screen, it will be black. Changing it to 30 seconds in should show it properly.

In upcoming 3.1.0 if the video starts at 0 seconds it will jump to 10% into the video as a lot of videos start black which makes it unclear it's a thumbnail as you are experiencing.

[mfraser]

I'm just seeing "Error Updating Thumbnail"

[cdgriffith]

@mfraser do the logs show an traceback?

[mfraser]

Generating thumbnail: "/usr/bin/ffmpeg" -loglevel error -i "/home/mfraser/Videos/Birds of Prey.mkv" -vf zscale=t=linear:npl=100,format=gbrpf32le,zscale=p=bt709,tonemap=tonemap=hable:desat=0,zscale=t=bt709:m=bt709:r=tv,format=yuv420p,scale="min(320,iw):-1" -map 0:0 -an -y -map_metadata -1 -vframes 1 "/home/mfraser/.local/share/FastFlix/thumbnail_preview.png"
ERROR Could not generate thumbnail: b"[AVFilterGraph @ 0x55f852d32580] No such filter: 'zscale'\nError reinitializing filters!\nFailed to inject frame into filter network: Invalid argument\nError while processing the decoded data for stream #0:0\n"

[cdgriffith]

Ah, some versions of FFmpeg are built with outdated versions of zimg. Are you using latest ffmpeg 4.3+ static build from https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/ ? (I put that gotcha in the readme but is an easy detail to miss. )

[cdgriffith]

Adding error message that is more clear in 3.1.0

020-10-15 18:10:25 jvm fastflix[4420] ERROR Could not generate thumbnail because you are using an outdated FFmpeg! 
Please use FFmpeg 4.3+ built against the latest zimg libraries. 
Static builds available at https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
(Linux distributions are often slow to update)

[cdgriffith]

The new error message has been added to https://github.com/cdgriffith/FastFlix/releases/tag/3.1.0

And while it may still perform most actions with outdated FFmpeg versions, I won't explicitly support them so not adding backwards compatability for them at this point. (For example, without the zscale filter, Remove HDR would also not work)