[SOLVED] Can video reel on thumbnails be turned off?

[Schultz]

Is there an option anywhere to turn off the video reel adornment on video file thumbnails? Thanks.
[17.3 Mate 64 bit]

Untitled.png

[Schultz]

Well, I have to say I'm a little surprised to get no answers to this. In Windows all you need to do to get rid of them is a simple registry hack. Nobody knows of a way to get rid of them in Mint? Maybe by deleting an image file somewhere?

[Schultz]

I'm surprised that all I got from this thread is crickets chirping. So I'm just going to assume there is no way to do this.

cricket.jpg

[ibbill]

You may want to take a look at the thread the last one on the page seems to have the problem solved good luck.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/136024/h ... file-types

[Schultz]

That's not what I want. I want a thumbnail. What I don't want is the video reel decoration that marks it as a video file. Thanks anyway.

[not_Daniel]

What an odd request. Can you explain if the reels scale up with icon size and you have extra large thumbnails? For me, sometimes I can't even be bothered with thumbnails because of the ridiculous amount of cpu the parser eats in a long list, especially in Cinnamon. Although I don't know the answer, I know where to look, that would be Caja -- the file manager (and thumbnail parser) in mate. I would start by inspecting fm-icon-view.c as that would be the logical place to look. It could be messy though, C makes me nauseated. Also wouldn't hurt to ask on the official mate forum: http://forums.mate-desktop.org/

[not_Daniel]

Lol, someone needs to update their todo list...

[Moem]

I'm surprised that all I got from this thread is crickets chirping. So I'm just going to assume there is no way to do this.

It's always possible that you're simply the only one who cares. If noone else wants to do this, they're not going to know how to do it.

[Schultz]

not_Daniel wrote:
What an odd request. Can you explain if the reels scale up with icon size and you have extra large thumbnails? . . . Also wouldn't hurt to ask on the official mate forum: http://forums.mate-desktop.org/

Yes they scale. I size my thumbnails up one from normal. And I have asked on the Mate forums. Haven't gotten even one response there. http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3767

I'll have to check into this icon view you mentioned. Is this a folder somewhere?

[not_Daniel]

not_Daniel wrote:
What an odd request. Can you explain if the reels scale up with icon size and you have extra large thumbnails? . . . Also wouldn't hurt to ask on the official mate forum: http://forums.mate-desktop.org/

Yes they scale. I size my thumbnails up one from normal. And I have asked on the Mate forums. Haven't gotten even one response there. http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3767

I'll have to check into this icon view you mentioned. Is this a folder somewhere?

There's 3 places in that git repository that mention icons or patterns, but I can't find the reel specified. Searching "reel" also turns up nothing. I found the normal picture thumbnail outline that includes the shadow but either the reel decoration is programmatically generated or it's somewhere else mate-desktop git repo. The original creator of "ma-tay" who forked gnome2 is actually Argentinian with bad English (but he's very good at making the best desktop with the least amount of bugs imo so far) and hasn't posted on these forums since 4 years ago.

Either way if you find the reference, you'll need to properly modify the code, debug it, and then recompile mate. I'm assuming that's something even an advanced user would cough at.

[ostracized]

I'm surprised that all I got from this thread is crickets chirping. So I'm just going to assume there is no way to do this.

cricket.jpg

During some unreleated code auditing I found exactly what you're looking for. Line #380 in xplayer/src/xplayer-video-thumbnailer.c:

Code: Select all

...
filename = g_build_filename (DATADIR, "xplayer", "filmholes.png", NULL);
...

Check out the images yourself in your own xplayer install folder: /usr/share/xplayer

I found filmholes-big-left.png peculiar. This is a very old image, at least available since 2006. Google has nothing on the image itself but I suspect it was a remnant from the gnome/totem days in late 2005 exported into xplayer. According to xplayer's changelog, the modification mentions "cells" on the side of the thumbnail and was first made on version 0.96.0, which I believe is years-old.

But notice the identifier on the image itself: E09 5289A2 -- your guess is as good as mine as to what (or who) that refers to. Here is a better view of it:

bigLeft-rotated-right.png

1. 1 billion shades of blue-grey?
2. A Brazilian guy on LinkedIn with a matching url profile that has skills in "c++" and "programming"...perhaps diagnosed with diabetes?
3. 11.4 cm-width yost jaws for a bench vise that go for a cool $700+?
4. Episode 9 of tv show 'x' with the production code 5289A2 that initial OP liked a lot?

Notice the filmstrip itself...it can't be "modern" 35mm because the lettering would cover the track for surround audio. It could be 16mm with a strange "repetitive binary-sounding" audio track as seen on filmholes-big-right.png.

Anyway, you could try to be funny and just replace filmholes.png with a 1x1 transparent png with the same name and see if it works, lol. Otherwise, send a feature request to Clem.

[ostracized]

Oh wow, I was right about the change being "years-old", I just found the "pre-github" changelog and the "cells" were first added on 14 March, 2003! Apparently you can thank "Tuomas" for the idea.

Bastien Nocera then added the "better holes" (the peculiar ones I mentioned) on 4 July, 2004. Looks like he's still active to today, I'll have to ping him on IRC to see if he's the original author.

[Schultz]

So you're saying it's xplayer that's putting the video reels on the thumbnail? Would they go away if I remove xplayer from my computer? Or better, could I just remove the image file? Or would that break something?

[ostracized]

So you're saying it's xplayer that's putting the video reels on the thumbnail? Would they go away if I remove xplayer from my computer? Or better, could I just remove the image file? Or would that break something?

Yes. But xplayer is the mechanism by which video thumbnails get rendered in the first place. It's too bad because there's 4 "not really needed" firefox plugins that get fully removed when xplayer is uninstalled. (Flash is not one of them but should be removed anyway for posterity. )

In your situation, try both scenarios about replacing/deleting the file. Just because a thumbnail border file doesn't exist will mean that the entire file manager will needlessly crash. But, like I said, I would first try replacing the file with a transparent tiny image file with the same name. My guess is that thumbnailer will simply accept the name as it's not likely going to be running a pre-defined checksum against it each time the file is used.

[ostracized]

Btw I just tested the replacement method and it's working beautifully (LM18.1 mate beta.) Your thumbnail cache will still contain the reels on videos already parsed by the file manager until theoretically you empty the cache. Can I just say it's really weird dragging around a file that contains only a single transparent pixel?:

haha-pixel.jpg

The commands are pretty rudimentary too, I set a backup to easily revert back (which I probably will do.) Open a terminal and do the following:

Code: Select all

cd /usr/share/xplayer
sudo mv filmholes.png filmholes.png.bak
sudo cp '~/xyz/filmholes.png' .

"xyz" is whatever the path is to the modified file. Instead of manually typing out a long path, I always drag-and-drop files into the terminal window itself and that will automatically put in the full path in single quotes. Notice the period there at the end, that means "current directory." And that pretty much does it.

Personally I find the reels enabled makes it easier to quickly distinguish videos from pictures, for example: in a mess of a "reddit download" folder in the icon view of caja. What's still annoying about thumbnail rendering on videos is: it's still cpu-intensive (even compared to windows), especially when you have a folder with many videos for example.

[ostracized]

And just for the sake of testing I rm'd the file to see what would happen. Caja didn't seem to mind, new videos are being parsed without the reel border and without errors (at least not in the syslog, but may be elsewhere)...but I don't know if the rendering is taking a small fraction of time slower because of potential error handling...it took a good ~15 seconds to fully render thumbnails for 21 standard videos, I don't have a baseline to compare, but my gut is telling me the transparent file replacement option is probably the better option here.

[Schultz]

How do I create a transparent image in Gimp? And should it only be 1 pixel? The original image size is 9 x 35.

[ostracized]

How do I create a transparent image in Gimp? And should it only be 1 pixel? The original image size is 9 x 35.

Really simple, open Gimp, chose file -> new, use these settings (be sure to click "advanced"):

gimp-new.png

click ok -> then do a ctrl+shift+e keyboard shortcut to export the image, name it as filmholes.png, make note of where it's being saved (or change the location to be saved) -> export -> and only have the last checkbox selected as seen here:

gimp2.png

click export again, and you're done. (Then quitting gimp entirely is ctrl+q).

P.S. The pixel size really doesn't matter here, I just use 1x1 because that's the least amount of overhead of rendering in my own head, even if it's fractionally faster than 9x35. (I could be wrong about this as it may scale/duplicate many times for larger thumbnails when choosing a higher icon view value of 100%...................w/e someone correct me .)

[Schultz]

Thanks ostracized, it worked! The only thing I did differently was that I made the transparent image size 9 x 35.

I owe you a cold beer.

[ostracized]

I did more testing on this because I was curious on the image duplications and found some more interesting properties.

• The thumbnailer will only accept the png border with transparency information. This means at least 1 pixel needs to be transparent or else the entire thumbnail fails to render. The original filmholes.png file is pretty interesting because all of its pixels are transparent -- partially -- that's why you see varying levels of black and white in the "reel" picture. The "peculiar" files I mentioned earlier have no transparency in them -- that's probably why they're the "legacy" ones.
• The left filmstrip is shown normally. The right filmstrip is flipped vertically. This appears on every vertical duplication -- see next bullet point.
• The standard 9x35 image appears to be duplicated vertically twice (plus 2 more pixels of a third duplication) on both sides of the thumbnail -- irregardless of what the caja icon view size is set at. It seems like no matter what, the image will always be duplicated vertically until 72 pixels are met in height -- that's why there's 2 pixels of a third duplication on the standard 9x35 image because 35+35+2 = 72. At least on a "widescreen" video. Vertical videos are another animal.
• Horizontally, the image does not appear to be duplicated, even if it's 1 pixel thick.

So, you would think the "ideal" transparent image would be 1x72 because that would never theoretically be duplicated -- but that may be foolish because who knows what happens on other file managers or lower DPI screens (or 'x' number of other cases) where the actual thumbnail is drawn less than 72 pixels in height. I also can't tell if a non-duplicated 1x72 image is making the thumbnail render any "faster" anyway. (Or if smaller sizes are rendering particularly "slower.")

In conclusion, you're probably safe using a <= 9 x <= 35 image.