JWthumbs

Want to add tooltip thumbnails to your JWPlayer? You're welcome!

JWthumbs is a Ruby gem to create a .VTT file and a sprite of thumbnails of a given video file (mp4, mpg, avi, mov and so on...). You can't create timeline thumnails easier than this. Heavily inspired by vlanard's great Python script.

System requirements

In order to use JWthumbs, you must have ffmpeg and imagemagick installed.

Installation

Installation of JWthumbs is pretty straigt forward. Add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'jwthumbs'

And then:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install jwthumbs

Usage

Instantiate your video file:

movie = Jwthumbs::Movie.new("YOUR_VIDEO.mp4")

Jwthumbs::Movie.new accepts second parameter as a options hash. You can configure several stuff at the same time you instantiate your video like this:

movie = Jwthumbs::Movie.new("YOUR_VIDEO.mp4", seconds_between: 60, sprite_name: "my_sprite_name.jpg")

or after you instentiated your video, you can use Jwthumbs::Movie file to configure things:

movie = Jwthumbs::Movie.new("YOUR_VIDEO.mp4")
movie.seconds_between = 60
movie.sprite_name = "my_sprite_name.jpg"

and then to create your thumbnails and .VTT file just run this command.

movie.create_thumbs!

If you haven't changed defaults, your _sprite.jpg and _thumbs.vtt file will be exportes to output directory of your root path.

"What will I do now?"

If you're using JWPlayer, there is a cool tutorial on their web site, see Adding Tooltip Thumbnails

Configuration

:outdir (string): The path you want your files to be exported. Example: /this/is/my/path

:seconds_between (integer): Time in seconds between each of snapshots to be taken. Default is video duration / 10.

:thumb_width (integer): Width of thumbnails that will be placed in the sprite of images. Bigger thumb width size means bigger sprite and bigger file size. Default is 100 which is also recommended.

:vttfile (string): Name of your .VTT file. Default is file_name_thumbs.vtt

:spritefile (string): Name of your sprite file. Default is file_name_sprite.jpg

:clear_files (true / false): Thumbnails should be deleted or not? Before creating sprite, number of snapshots will be taken from the video in respect of :seconds_between parameter. Sprite is created by montageing those thumbnails into one file. So you may need to use thumbnails or you may not. Your choice. Default is true.

:gallery_mode_on (true / false): You can use JwThumbs to create snapshot galleries. When this option is true, snapshots of the video will be created but .VTT file and image sprite will be skipped. Default value is false.

Contributing

Any kind of participation is welcomed.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Author, Licence and Permissions

scaryguy - 2014 - MIT

CAUTION: YOU CAN NOT USE THIS GEM IN APPLICATIONS HAVING ANY KIND OF INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT (see YouTube's [policy](http://www.youtube.com/yt/policyandsafety/policy.html) that I support).