In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate thumbnails from a video file.

Warning!!! Please use small video files only, if your machine is low-end.

We will primarily use the fluent-ffmpeg library to perform the action.

For this, download the ffmpeg library from the official site of ffmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/.

Extract the zip and add the bin folder to your environment variables path.

Steps:

1. Create a folder for the conversion, name it as video-thumbnail-generator .

1. Initialize it as a nodejs package.

$ npm init -y

1. Install the fluent ffmpeg library

$ npm install fluent-ffmpeg

1. Import the library

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg')

1. The first argument of the ffmpeg will be the path to the video file

ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')

1. Take screenshot and save to the folder (Note: Multiple screenshots can be taken at a time, but we will take only 1)

ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')
  .screenshots({
     count: 1,
     filename: 'thumbnail-%s.png',
     folder: 'output_path/'
  })

Entire code

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg')
ffmpeg('path_to_videofile')
  .on('filenames', (filenames) => {
     console.log(filenames.join(', ') // Display the filenames to be generated
  })
  .on('end', () => {
     console.log('Screenshots taken!');
  })
  .screenshots({
     count: 1,
     filename: 'thumbnail-%s.png',
     folder: 'output_path/'
  })