I've tried searching and was surprised this hasn't come up before, or maybe people are just calling it by a different name.
Are there any plans to create a video timeline thumbnail feature for navigating the currently played video much like how Netflix does?
This would be an awesome enhancement to the playback UI!
Kodi has the feature to show thumbnails for chapters and bookmarks (check the bookmark dialog in OSD), which goes in the direction you want. But on low power devices like the PI, this feature is disabled by default, because it couldn't handle HW decoding the video and thumbs (at least not in time). Services like Netflix and Youtube precreate those thumbs server side. Kodi could probably do the same for some of the local media, but not for streamed content as you would have to seek through the streamed file and extract thumbs while you also stream the file - not sure everybodies bandwidth would like the extra load etc.
Thanks for the prompt response da-anda.
I definitely agree, this wouldn't work for streaming content or very low powered devices. The bookmark thumbs are a great step in the right direction but I'd love to see a fully integrated thumbnail strip on the timeline for local content. Maybe this could be handled as a low priority pre-processing event after an automated library scan?
Side note: in a totally unrelated thread I've been pursuing a bug with Intel and trying to act as a liason between them and Team Kodi without getting much attention from the Kodi developers. Could you advise me on how best to proceed with the thread linked below?
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=289533&page=4
I think both sides are pointing their fingers at each other but Intel is willing to pursue the investigation further with someone knowledgeable, it's just way outside the scope of my skillset.
your best bet with Windows issues is afedchin, and he already seems to be in contact with you
I support this request, and would like to propose another way this functionality could be presented to the user: in the context menu of a video, after "play", there could be an option "show visual index" or something like that, and it would show a full-screen thumbnail breakdown of the video, similar to how the popular movie thumbnailers give a visual overview of a video. Unlike the one-dimensional timeline, this would be 2D, so navigating to a scene would require fewer clicks.
If a video has previously been partially played, "show visual index" would be shown as the third option, after play from beginning and resume at ... .
There could be two settings for this: constant time difference between thumbnails, and constant total number of pictures.
A more advanced version of this functionality would not mindlessly go by time increment or total number, but by scene change amounts. ffmpeg can already do this:
http://www.bogotobogo.com/FFMpeg/ffmpeg_...iframe.php.
Like a previous poster suggested, the best way to implement this would probably be to index scan the video library in the background and store the index files.
Perhaps you mean 'scrubbing' ? That's showing a thumbnail of the video related to the seeked position ?
MrMC fork just added scrubbing for the AppleTV 4/4K and I see koying is playing around with some sort of auto index/chapter display of thumbs. It's pretty easy to do for local content but would require core/skin support changes to implement.
Yea, similar. For the Netflix version, Seek positions are predetermined seek positions. In MrMC, the progress thumb is tied to the pre-seek position, then using the Siri remote touch pad, you can flick it left or right any amount to get right where you want. Then click to jump there.
I think koying's flavor is more like the Netflix version but generating thumbs for each 10/30 seconds in real time is going to really hammer the cpu resources.
Real time would be the icing on the cake, I'd just be happy to have this functionality where the thumbs are precomputed and stored in the background.
I was researching this Netflix feature and came across this thread. Wondering if this is now possible with the current version?
I'm searching for the same - is there any way to get this on Kodi 18?
I like the Netflix version of that where you see a timeline of frames centered at the seek position.