[Digikam-users] Thumbnail generation stopping at video file

[Fabien]

Hello,

Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
>>recently my digikam installation (0.8.1) developed a strange problem:
>>The thumbnail generation stops at the first video file in my collection.
>>Formerly, a video file was represented with a little "film" icon. Now it is
>>just white (no icon), and I also don't get any photo thumbnails after this
>>file. Even the album thumbnails don't get generated anymore. If I move the
>>video files a couple of albums down, the thumbnail generation goes on
>>towards that new place.
> 
> 
> I once had that problem. Digikam uses KDE libs to get thumbnails from movies, 
> so please check if the thumbnail creation works in Konqueror. If it does not, 
> it is a bug of arts or somewhere, and since a lot in this area is broken, it 
> might or rather might not get fixed before KDE4.

I had exactly the same trouble.

I spent nearly 2 hours to figure out why digikam behavior was different 
on 3 PCs running ubuntu :
- on the 1st one, thumbnails were generated correclty for pictures on 
video files (motion jpeg avi)
- on the 2nd one, thumbnails were only generated for pictures and icons 
were used for video files
- on the last one, thumbnails generation stopped after the first video 
file encountered...

This behavior was the same in konqueror.

Thanks to your hint about arts, I finally found that there were some 
troubles with xine plugin (libarts1-xine package in debian/ubuntu).

If libarts1-xine is installed (1st and 3rd case), then xine is used to 
generate the thumbnail. Using xine, it was not possible to read the avi 
file in case 3 but ok in case 1.
I found there were a missing package in the 3rd case : libxine-extracodecs

These extra codecs allow xine to read the avi file, so also to create 
the thumbnails...

So, installing libarts1-xine and libxine-extracodecs packages solved my 
troubles !

Maybe this should be added in the FAQ ?

--
Fabien