I'm having issues with a failure to create a thumbnail. FFMPEG converts the video, but no thumbnail. I've had everything working perfectly before on the same server, and with the same configuration. I'm scratching my head as to why it's not working this time around. The ffmpeg database output is below if it helps...

Conversion Failed: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i /usr/home/botvadmin/domains/beeon.tv/public_html/live/files/test-card_0.mov -vframes 1 -ss 00:00:01 -an -vcodec mjpeg -f rawvideo -s 100x75 /usr/home/botvadmin/domains/beeon.tv/public_html/live/files/videos/70_test_card_0.jpg

Running Drupal 5.1 on Free BSD 6.1.

Comments

travist’s picture

travist commented

It looks like your problem has something to do with the path.... From the log, it looks like it is trying to use

/usr/home/botvadmin/domains/beeon.tv/public_html/live/files/test-card_0.mov as your path...

Well, this doesn't look like a valid path because of the ".tv" right int the middle of it... Look into that and let me know.

Thanks,

Travis.

blim’s picture

blim commented

I've had it working before, the .tv bit is the domain which I believe is generated by Direct Admin, the path should not matter, my only thought was, because I was uploading a small 48k mov file, that the 2 second thumbnail capture was too long, I changed this to 1 second and still got the error. I also had the whole thing working like a dream up until last week, then the client decided they wanted a completely different taxonomy structure and design change, I dropped all databases and reinstalled drupal a-fresh, because it was easier than manually editing everything again. In hindsight I should have left it...

Below is the ffmpeg string I'm using:

-i @input -acodec mp3 -ar 22050 -ab 64 -ac 1 -f flv -s 320x240 @output
blim’s picture

blim commented

Interesting, it now works I changed the thumbnail size to the default setting.

I think the majority of the problems/bugs with this module are down to FFMPEG being a difficult beast to tame. Just to add, in future revisions it would be nice to have the following features:-

An option to allow the video files to reside outside the root of drupal (for streaming via lighttp) and,

It would be cool if you can call a *nix .sh (shell script) which encodes, thumbnails, renames and then distributes the results (flv file, raw video and thumbnail) to different folders.

My server guy wrote one for me for a previous incarnation of a project, as far as I know it works very well, and will be used as a backup, if all else fails option. If I recall correctly as soon as a file is uploaded to a raw video folder, the script will run and encode, create a thumbnail and rename the file to a random MD5. We'll be happy to share our knowledge!

travist’s picture

travist commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Great... I hope you don't mind, but I changed the status of this issue. I really don't want people to get the wrong impression that I am not doing anything about these bugs... but I think that I must agree with you. The anomalies with ffmpeg are really out of my control. Hopefully, they will release a better version of it soon.

Thanks for your input.