Video Preview

[ThesiiNCey]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When I upload videos in the following format ( MP4 | MOV | AVI | WMV | 3GP ) I get no preview so a Thumbnail

Describe the solution you'd like

A possibility that one can use ffmpeg for this would be a great solution

[impalax33]

This feature would be really great yes

[micbar]

@ThesiiNCey

Do you know a library which does the video processing on the server side? maybe even without any C-Bindings?

[ThesiiNCey]

Only ffmpeg or Imagemagic as bin only File

[micbar]

Only ffmpeg or Imagemagic as bin only File

Hm. That is what i feared. This would introduce C dependencies into our codebase, which is error prone and hard to maintain.

[ThesiiNCey]

Only ffmpeg or Imagemagic as bin only File

Hm. That is what i feared. This would introduce C dependencies into our codebase, which is error prone and hard to maintain.

someone tells me it can be possible with -> https://github.com/notedit/media-server-go

[micbar]

Media Server Go has a c dependency too 🙈

[ThesiiNCey]

https://github.com/h2non/imaginary

That would actually be the last method I could think of, I even asked Chatgpt for it

[micbar]

That looks very interesting.

[ThesiiNCey]

so could that possibly be a possibility?

[illode]

Is imaginary's dependency on libvips (plus optionally libheif (and libjxl in the next release)) better than any of the other options? On top of that, the only new formats would be PDF, SVG, HEIF, AVIF, and JXL, none of which are video formats (although I would love for them to be added!)

[illode]

I think if generating thumbnails for a variety of video / (more) image formats is to be added, some sort of ffmpeg wrapper is pretty much unavoidable.

It looks like imaginary (built using bimg) / libvips can support more than just the formats I mentioned, but they use ImageMagick. Since ImageMagick itself doesn't support videos, when generating thumbnails from a video, it ends up just using ffmpeg anyways.

imaginary also only seems useful if the pre-built microservice itself is desired, otherwise bimg can be used directly. And while libvips' design / features do seem nice, the lack of direct video support means another dependency would be needed for video anyways, which was the whole point of this issue.

Having said all that, I would also greatly appreciate video / (more) image thumbnails. Having no thumbnails makes storing videos in OCIS somewhat unpleasant.

[ThesiiNCey]

I haven't looked at it for a long time, but is it now possible to get a video preview just like with GIF and webm and webp files?

[kulmann]

I haven't looked at it for a long time, but is it now possible to get a video preview just like with GIF and webm and webp files?

No. Sadly pretty much nothing changed in that regard :-(

[helmut72]

Isn't this now possible with libvips support?

https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/pull/10310

[rhafer]

I don't think github.com/davidbyttow/govips/v2/ can handle videos. (I don't even think libvips itself does)

[helmut72]

Thank you. I've searched for h265 and thought, h265 is always video: https://github.com/libvips/libvips/issues?q=is%3Aissue+h265+is%3Aclosed

[vegaz337]

How about MoviePy,FFmpeg-python, ffmpeg.wasm, JCodec? Would love to see some progress here since its really unpleasant to have a lot of videos in the cloud

[micbar]

@vegaz337 You are welcome to contribute.

IMHO from a product perspective, that feature is not a no brainer.

Infinite Scale is a product to do "Secure File Sync and Share", enhanced by WebOffice capabilities.

Thumbnails for videos is debatable in that scope.

1. The added value of a small random thumbnail which only represents a second from the video is not high
2. The added resource use on the server is not proportional to the added value

From my product owner POV, I do not support that feature.

@kobergj @unbekanntes-pferd FYI

[helmut72]

added value of a small random thumbnail which only represents a second from the video is not high

IMHO better than a placeholder symbol with filename IMG_1234.MOV. No one have any clue about the content.

Infinite Scale is a product to do "Secure File Sync and Share", enhanced by WebOffice capabilities.

I thought Infinite Scale is also there for media files and not office files only? See this news from you: https://owncloud.com/news/safe-memories/

Taking videos on any event or vacation is very common and let's imagine a lot of placeholder symbols because it's videos or heic images taken from an iPhone with default setting.

For movie files, there is even a Coverart tag possible, using an integrated image as a thumbnail. https://superuser.com/a/1328212

[micbar]

heic images taken from an iPhone with default setting.

This is planned. See https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/pull/7001

[kulmann]

I thought Infinite Scale is also there for media files and not office files only?

I share this opinion. Office files is the thing that is investigated and implemented best at the moment - I'm sure that's what @micbar meant.

Our idea was and is, that oCIS is also a metadata platform. As such we aim to extract metadata from files (locally of course!) and make it available in a nice ui. That's also what our web extension system aims at.

Examples:

• right sidebar Photo metadata panel, which displays some commonly used EXIF data of photos. Those are extracted via apache tika and stored in the metadata of the respective file.
• right sidebar Audio metadata panel, which displays some commonly used id3-tags of audio files. Those are also extracted via apache tika and stored in the metadata of the respective file.
• if an mp3 file has a cover images (back and front) they are automatically displayed as preview
• there is a third party app https://github.com/dschmidt/web-app-gpx-viewer which not only offers an open street map integration for .gpx files, but also uses geolocation metadata (again: extracted via apache tika and stored in the metadata of the respective file) to show a small map in the right sidebar for images with geolocation info, as well as this PR https://github.com/dschmidt/web-app-gpx-viewer/pull/15 which aims at providing a folder view (as sibling of the list and tiles views in the files app) where files with geolocation info inside a folder a visualized as markers on a map.

Ideas I personally had in mind - but didn't have the time, yet, to follow:

• make stored metadata available via search. E.g. Show me all photos which were taken with an aperture in the range of x-y
• backend side transcoding of videos into h264, make those available for playback in the preview app.

As you can see, there are things going on which are not driven by office file integrations. ;-) And most importantly: You are invited to help at any time. We're building our web extension system with the idea in mind, that anyone who is interested can develop their own apps and extensions. See e.g. https://owncloud.dev/clients/web/extension-system/ for a starting point. Contributions to the main repos are of course welcome as well.

[helmut72]

I thought Infinite Scale is also there for media files and not office files only?

I share this opinion. Office files is the thing that is investigated and implemented best at the moment - I'm sure that's what @micbar meant.

In https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/issues/7127#issuecomment-2469992551 he wrote: "I do not support that feature.". No

IMHO no room for other interpretations.

[vegaz337]

@vegaz337 You are welcome to contribute.

IMHO from a product perspective, that feature is not a no brainer.

Infinite Scale is a product to do "Secure File Sync and Share", enhanced by WebOffice capabilities.

Thumbnails for videos is debatable in that scope.

1. The added value of a small random thumbnail which only represents a second from the video is not high
2. The added resource use on the server is not proportional to the added value

From my product owner POV, I do not support that feature.

@kobergj @unbekanntes-pferd FYI

I would love to contribute but currently I dont have that time to work myself into the whole project. Nevertheless I think the value is extremely high since I think most people use clouds not to host pdfs/excels but images and videos. You dont need a cloud for couple MBs of pdfs/word documents. And since you said "Secure File Sync and Share" it is right about this scope or not? How do you handle GB or TB of videos / images and want to share the right picture/video? Either you have to name all of them properly which is ages of work if you have automated sync and just uploading everything or you have to download every video to see if it is the right video. So sharing with other people is basically not possible. Furthermore I cant even watch .mov files directly but they get downloaded. So now I have to download GB of files just to delete them right after because I took the wrong

[micbar]

Sorry, seems that I wrote something wrong and don’t want to upset people…

Gigabytes of, data, media files, that is exactly what ocis is for.

I just said „the value of displaying a small preview image for a video file is not proportional to the effort“

I agree that everybody wants to have the best user experience possible.

But I have a clear picture what is needed to provide video decoding and transcoding and extracting that into a preview. On the backend it is maybe no big effort to code that, but it will blow up the dependencies, traffic and needed resources on the backend.

We have experience in running a large service for more the one million users. We know how we need to fight for every cpu cycle and memory which we can reduce.

I think something like that could be a good community initiative, but like said earlier, I don’t see this coming from owncloud.

[micbar]

How do you handle GB or TB of videos / images and want to share the right picture/video?

Metadata is the key. We are already extracting metadata from images and audio files. That together with tagging could help tremendously.

[vegaz337]

Sorry, seems that I wrote something wrong and don’t want to upset people…

Gigabytes of, data, media files, that is exactly what ocis is for.

I just said „the value of displaying a small preview image for a video file is not proportional to the effort“

I agree that everybody wants to have the best user experience possible.

But I have a clear picture what is needed to provide video decoding and transcoding and extracting that into a preview. On the backend it is maybe no big effort to code that, but it will blow up the dependencies, traffic and needed resources on the backend.

We have experience in running a large service for more the one million users. We know how we need to fight for every cpu cycle and memory which we can reduce.

I think something like that could be a good community initiative, but like said earlier, I don’t see this coming from owncloud.

Thanks for your concern, dont worry you didnt upset me. Im just trying to find a solution since initially you asked for a library without C dependencies and I threw in some suggestions. I would love to have a solution where everyone is happy at the end of the day. If metadata somehow do it that would be great but currently I dont see how I would know which video exactly im looking for through that. Because in 2 years im sure I dont know anymore when and where I made this exact video. Maybe you can get me some knowledge here.

[ThesiiNCey]

There have been some good changes and improvements so far, but is it now possible to see videos and WEP images as previews? I've lost track of how many issues there are to really understand

[jacobgkau]

There have been some good changes and improvements so far, but is it now possible to see videos and WEP images as previews?

No. WebP images (which are extremely common online) still are not supported by OCIS. https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/issues/7483 has now been closed as "stale", with this tangentially-related issue about video previews being the only remaining issue page open.

[asalimonov]

It'd be great to have video previews or even a built-in video player for files. This could work without transcoding if the browser supports the format and the file isn't too hefty. Since you often get tons of files with wildcard-style names where you can't tell what's inside until you actually download them. Time is money for users, but bandwidth is cheap these days. This might help you unlock new customers who deal with a lot of video content.