Alternate approach of creating the thumbnails on the client side

[ziegenberg]

The approach of creating the thumbnail client side has a considerable disadvantage. The thumbnail quality depends on the video editor preview, which usually has a lower quality/resolution. That should be improved.

Originally posted by @geichelberger in https://github.com/opencast/opencast-editor/issues/760#issuecomment-1247151610

[mtneug]

How could this be improved? We are also very aggressive with the quality of the editor previews pushing them very low.

[geichelberger]

Instead of transmitting the thumbnail, we could push the timestamp and the source flavor or implement an endpoint that returns a server-side generated thumbnail. The thumbnails need to be server-side generated.

A higher resolution makes no sense because of the increased storage requirements and loading time.

[mtneug]

ok so back to server-side :D I don't see another way either.

[ziegenberg]

I wouldn't go as far as and call it "back to server-side". We now also have an instant user preview generated on the client side... 😬 Let's get the best of both worlds!