For those who like to have "thumbnails" of videos

Some of us like to post webpages or ebay auctions with high quality pictures, represented by thumbnails on the index page, to save bandwidth of viewers who may or may not be interested in large, slow to download images.
Some of us also like to make short videos of things.
Thumbnails of images can be made easily with ImageMagick.
I wrote a simple shell script to make "thumbnails" of video movies, by means of creating animated gifs.
Example of such page with "movie thumbnail" is here:
http://igor.chudov.com/tmp/irtool/
The shell script to make a "video thumbnail" is appended at the bottom. Essentially it extracts a 10 images from a video, separated by 1 second interval, resizes them to 20% of original, and collates them into an animated gif.
This script requires mplayer, transcode and ImageMagick, all standard components of Linux distributions.
=====================================================================#!/bin/sh
VIDEO=$1 GIF=$2
transcode -o ./-xxxx -x mplayer -y jpg -i $VIDEO --frame_interval 24 -c 1-241 convert -geometry 20\%x20\% ./-xxxx*.jpg $GIF rm ./-xxxx*

Ignoramus29761 wrote:
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Who in their right mind would even want the extra clutter on their page? If you were even remotely serious about high quality pictures you would be using a Nikon D200 at a bare minimum. The best advice is to keep it simple.
Rita

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Hey Igor, I love you like a brother, but _please_ don't open a crosspost portal to AMOE. Those bozos, or a subset of them rather, have really wreaked havoc upon rec.collecting.coins, I'd hate to have that happen here.

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OK, will keep this in mind, I will not xpost there.
i

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For a ebay type auction, I'll settle for FOCUSED. Just about any camera will do. Also pick a background that doesn't mesh with item, ditch the flash, use a tripod.
Wes S

Ignoramus29761 wrote:
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Putting them into HTML frames would look infinitely better.

Don Lancaster wrote:
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Also knock out your backgrounds. And maybe vingette them.

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I prefer Ranch.

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You mean a TABLE..BORDER frame or an IFRAME?
i

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Any frameset, iFrame included, would be a display nightmare. Cute idea, but not for a page where you want to sell something.

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You see, I can add a border for any picture, using ImageMagick (meaning that my scripts would automatically add border to the thumbnail jpegs/gifs). It is easy to do, I will experiment with it.
i

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or just add a border in the html. sample:
<img src="images-temp/mast.gif" alt="" width="386" height="135" border="1">
This isn't easy???

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That's also a great idea!
i

Ignoramus29761 wrote:
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And as old as dirt itself! As I always say, "Keep it simple" and you will be amazed at how much more impact your auctions will have.
Rita

Kurt wrote:
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Sure it is! But what's the fun of using a properly formatted HTML in a streamlined template when you can write bloatware to do the same thing? It's amazing that the very same people who bitch about MS being bloated are the ones writing bloat for other OSs and MS.
Rita

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Rita,
    A shell script with perhaps a dozen lines is bloatware? It is in my mind an elegant use of what comes with the OS in questions (linux), and is available for *free* for other unix variants, requiring only downloading and compiling for your machine in some cases.
    I know (and respect) you from another newsgroup, and am not reading this in the same newsgroup in which you are (apparently), and I think that his proposed solution is quite useful for his needs (though I disagree with putting animated images in e-Bay auctions -- they are a terrible waste of both bandwidth and CPU cycles once downloaded. I've seen some e-Bay auctions with so many animated GIFs that it was difficult to exit the page, let alone actually discover what was really being offered.
    Enjoy,         DoN.

DoN. Nichols wrote:
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My concerns are anything beyond simple and streamlined HTML for eBay auctions is bloat and unnecessary. Sure, a perl script *might* be helpful to some sellers that bulk upload, but templates and TurboLister blows scripts away.
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I can agree with that. Bandwidth and speed aren't really and issue on my end, but I still list all my auctions as streamlined and minimal as possible. This doesn't mean they don't look good or are highly informative, it means they are optimized for space savings and quick download. Of course, I include a maximum of two quality 400 x 400 pics that link to higher resolution ones if the potential buyer elects to click them. People don't realize that there are actually large portions of the eBay community that still use dial-up, especially in the rural areas. That being said, eBay adds enough bloat, there's no need for sellers to be part of the problem.
Rita

Kurt wrote:
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The point is that each border should be the same size and the images should be attractively arranged.
A plain old HTML table does this beautifully.

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Another ignorant OT-X-post by iggy.
Ever cared to look at the header of your postings? No? I'll help you with a single line: X-Complaints-To: snipped-for-privacy@usenetserver.com
HTH, Nick

On Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:03:30 +0200, snipped-for-privacy@gmx.de (Nick Müller) wrote:
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Nick... Drop it. There has always been a lot more noise on rcm than on ukrme. Live with it, because you won't, ever, be able to change it. Killfile those you don't like and be selective in the threads that you read. It's a lot less of a problem with an ADSL connection than it was with a 14.4kbaud modem!
PS. How's the triangular straight edge coming on. I've had a bit of a problem with my projects... too much time at work :-(
Regards Mark Rand RTFM