Install ”ffmpegthumbnailer’ in Fedora 18 for Faster Video Thumbnail Generation

‘ffmpegthumbnailer’ is a ‘FFmpeg‘ based video thumbnailer for GNU/Linux. It is very popular among the users because it has the ability to generate video thumbnails few times faster than the ones included in desktop environments such as Gnome & KDE.

I have written about how to install it in Ubuntu and Linux Mint (Cinnamon) in the past. Now because I have been using Fedora 18 in the past few days, I thought of writing an article on how to install it in Fedora might be beneficial for the users who are less experienced in GNU/Linux.

As far as I know, Fedora does not host packages such as ‘ffmpegthumbnailer’ in their main repository (due to software patent issues) therefore, first we have to enable a third-party maintained repository and then continue the installation. So as usual, please follow the below steps for achieving that.

Step 1:

There are other software repositories available, but I’ll be using the one called ‘RPM Fusion’. If you have already enabled this then you can skip this step and go directly to the ‘Step 2’.

Otherwise, simply enter the below command in your Terminal window.

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-18.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-18.noarch.rpm'

Step 2:

Now enter the below command to install ‘ffmpegthumbnailer’.

su -c 'yum install ffmpegthumbnailer'

Step 3:

As you would probably know, ‘Totem’ media player is being used to create video thumbnails by default. So in order for this to work, we have to replace that functionality with ‘ffmpegthumbnailer’. For that, first download a file from here.

Step 4:

Once the download completes, extract its content into your ‘Home’ folder.

Step 5:

Then enter the below command to replace this file with the original one.

su -c 'mv totem.thumbnailer /usr/share/thumbnailers/'

Step 6:

Then for the changes to take effect, we have to restart the file manager. Use the below command for that.

nautilus -q

If you use the ‘Cinnamon’ desktop on Fedora 18, then enter the below one instead.

nemo -q

That’s it, from now on, ‘ffmpegthumbnailer’ will be generating your video thumbnails.

Note: Please remember that, this method has one drawback. That is, whenever you update your OS, if ‘Totem’ is also updated, then there is a possibility that this file might get overwritten and you’ll have to go through all this again.