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A comment on Ask HN: Thumbnail API.

Re:Ask HN: Thumbnail API by csclark on Thursday February 27, 2014 @02:22AM (#7310845)
We would definitely give it a try - Video Thumbnails can be tricky, as it makes all the difference for a user to view it or not.

For instance, generally the first second of video is blank, though taking a thumbnail at the middle is not necessarily representative.

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Re:Ask HN: Thumbnail API by matthewarkin on Thursday February 27, 2014 @05:23AM (#7311383)
Yea, that is a tricky part. Most of the video encoding services can be configured to take a thumbnail at the beginning, at a user determined point, or every X seconds.

In my use case,I don't necessarily have any reason to have the entire video encoded and it adds an unnecessarily complicated structure.

Currently I just take a thumbnail .1 second in (this also allows me to utilize minimal bandwidth since I don't download the entire video), but it should be fairly easy to add a parameter

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