Control Video Thumbnail/Poster

✋ Feature Requests
1

When uploading a video to an asset field you have no control over the thumbnail/poster frame that mux generates. In many cases the thumbnail chosen is less than ideal or completely unusable. This can be especially annoying when using videos as autoplayed backgrounds.

Currently I’m creating image fields that I use to pass a custom screenshot to the video thumbnail. It would be much more ideal to either choose the video frame, or upload an image to use as the poster inside the asset field instead of having two fields for a video.

2

Agree! It would be great to be able to config the other mux params available:

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We tend to need the thumbnail of the first frame of the video to use a poster image

3

Did you ever solve this. Having the same challenge with Mux and need a way to pic thumbnail and/or allow them to upload a video as the thumbnail.

4

Hi @eayers, and welcome to the community!

We unfortunately still don’t have a good UI for this, but there is a manual workaround you can consider?

You can make a separate field to store a time value (in seconds), next to the video:

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Then you can query the thumbnailSeconds field with your video’s muxPlaybackId:

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And then use it to compose a image.mux.com URL for the thumbnail, like this:

https://image.mux.com/{post.video.video.muxPlaybackId}/thumbnail.jpg?time={post.thumbnailSeconds}. You can also add any other Mux image parameters to it you’d like.

For example:
https://image.mux.com/SlFakshRVuF010002COIihQIegP2oew6Zam/thumbnail.jpg?time=3.5&width=200&rotate=90&flip_v=true

I know this is still a tedious manual workaround, nowhere as nice as being able to just scrub through the video and select the thumbnail frame in the UI. Sorry about that! I hope this feature request gets traction and is implemented in the future, but in the meantime, hope this workaround at least gives you an option to work with…

1 Like
5

Thanks for the update! Seems like they really should have this.

6

Yeah, I agree it’d be a nice feature!

We’re a pretty small team and try to go through the feature requests in order of votes, so sometimes it takes a while. Sorry about that, and we really appreciate your patience here :pray:

That said, we also are in the process of onboarding a few new devs recently, so hopefully we’ll see more features soon!