#733 preview thumbnails on mouseover like on YouTube

[msys]

Hello,

While I'm continuously using your player for years and - thanks to its customizable interface - I think it is the best player in terms of both convenience and features, there is this one thing that I feel is missing whenever I go from online viewing of YouTube videos to the 'offline' SMPlayer.

YouTube (and many other online video websites) has this feature that whenever the mouse is over the timeline, it displays the thumbnail of the video at (or rather near) this point in timeline.

This greatly improves seeking over long videos and in my opinion would be a big quality-of-life improvement. For some reason I haven't seen it in any other desktop players.

I'd imagine this as an option to create the thumbnails for a given video (as this would take time, obviously, depending on whether only keyframes would be used or other frames as well and the amount of them) and then the SMPlayer GUI would use such generated images and display them in a manner described. For faster PCs the generation could occur automatically in a parallel thread(s) while the video is already playing.

Would it be possible to implement this somehow into SMPlayer, or is it too much work?

Regards,
Michał Skrzypek

[msys]

I have to correct myself, apparently there are desktop video players with this feature; according to https://superuser.com/questions/359697/need-windows-video-player-with-seek-preview-feature there are at least a few (KMPlayer, PotPlayer and MPC-BE). I don't know about portability though, none of these are for Linux it seems...

[Existence]

I confirm, a very necessary function!

[msys]

Yup, because of the lack of this feature, I have since moved to PotPlayer on Windows (on Linux I couldn't find anything worth switching to). It is very configurable, so I was able to set it up mostly identical to the way SMPlayer behaves.

Unfortunately, this program spies on its users, is not open sourced, Windows-only, etc. so I'd gladly switch back some day.

[Existence]

I would switch to PotPlayer, but I can’t install it through Wine in Linux.
Do not tell me how?

[Zero Seven]

You know there is a player you can use. https://flathub.org/apps/org.kde.haruna You go into settings > general > then you will see use thumbnail previews. Great for linux. You can just use Haruna. It'll work fine.

[Zero Seven]

Btw I used to use pot player back when I used windows. But now I have no need for it. I get thumbnail previews on Haruna. Also on MPV with thumbfast and uosc. Haruna works out of the box, but mpv needs scripts to have thumbnails previews. Both work fine though. Although Haruna more naturally works as a gui since unlike mpv its meant to. Base mpv is more a command line based player at least before you have any scripts.

[spicy33]

It seems that MPV and ExMPLayer support seeking preview on Linux
https://askubuntu.com/questions/683329/which-media-player-has-seek-preview-with-thumbnails
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/474222/is-there-any-video-player-which-can-seek-with-thumbnail-like-in-youtube

I hope SMPlayer will have this feature soon, because I really like this player, but this feature is more and more important for me, so I will probably switch later.

[Zero Seven]

You know there is a player you can use. https://flathub.org/apps/org.kde.haruna You go into settings > general > then you will see use thumbnail previews. Great video player for linux. MPV has a script for thumbnail seeking but that's more work- https://github.com/po5/thumbfast Haruna is probably what your looking for though. As for mpv you'd probably want this UI instead of default as well- https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc MPV can be made better with scripts which is annoying and doesn't appeal to most people. But it does work fine once you get some scripts for it.