[MPlayer-users] creating thumbnail-screenshots of movies

[John Brown]

>From: Marco Trudel <mtrudel at gmx.ch>
>Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:04:12 +0200
>
>Hello list
>
>I'm work with MPlayer 1.0pre8 on Windows and I'm trying to create 
>thumbnails-screenshots that have a maximum width and height of 100. I 
>currently use this command:
>
>mplayer.exe -frames 2 -vo jpeg -zoom -xy 100 movie.mpg
>
<snip>
>Back to the problem: If there will ever be a video, where the height is 
>bigger than the width, the height will get bigger than 100px.
>"-vf scale" doesn't seem to be able to keep the aspect ratio.

>"-dsize 100:100:2" does exactly what I need when playing a video, but it 
>seems to be ignored on creating jpegs...setting.
>
>So, how to create screenshots that have a max height and max width of 100 
>and keep the correct aspect ratio?
>
-vf scale will work, but you have to calculate the width and height.
If you have a movie that is 480(W) X 640 (H), that is, 3:4, you could use
mplayer -vf scale=75:100 -vo jpeg.

I do not know of an automatic way that will work correctly whether the movie
has a portrait or landscape orientation: I suppose that what you really need 
is a
-yx option.