Why can't we have thumbnails for video uploads on mobile?

Community Support
1

Description

Videos upload as a black box with a play arrow. They play fine, however.

Server Setup Information

  • Version of Rocket.Chat Server: recent/latest
  • Operating System: Ubuntu 18
  • Deployment Method:native
  • Number of Running Instances: 1
  • DB Replicaset Oplog:
  • NodeJS Version:
  • MongoDB Version: 12.8.4 (?)
  • Proxy: nginx
  • Firewalls involved:

Any additional Information

I’ve been using Element with Matrix/Synapse and really like how the mobile client generates a thumbnail of the video to send up. This is really the only thing that really bugs me about RC. Are there plans for this in the roadmap? Thanks.

3 Likes
2

Interested in this as well

1 Like
3

I am also interested in this.

8

Confirmed looks like desktop client uses the video element which does this kinda automatically. But looks like mobile doesn’t.

I think this is a feature request then :slight_smile:

2 Likes
9

Hey.
We have this open PR for thumbnails [FEATURE] Show Thumbnails/Preview for Uploaded Videos by pratyaksh123 · Pull Request #2772 · RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.ReactNative · GitHub

The issue is that it downloads the video in order to get the first frame and show as thumb and that might take some time.
The usual way to do is the server doing this job on upload and returning a thumb for requests.
The same should be done for images as well.

It’s planned to be done soon.
Thanks!

10

Interesting. Glad it’s at least getting some traction.

Can the thumbnail be generated client-side? I see that’s what Element is doing. What about integrating ffmpeg? The problem with how Element is doing it (client side) is that if the video was uploaded via web, the mobile client wont have this thumbnail (unless the web client also generates a thumbnail).

11

Yes, we don’t want to overload the servers, so we might end up doing that on clients.

12

Curious to see if any (hopeful) work was started on this one. Thanks!

13

maybe have an option to:

  • turn thumbnail generation on/off
  • option to offload thumbnail generation to clients for larger servers with more traffic