koldfront

Duration on thumbnails on my desktop

I was looking at a folder full of videos, trying to decide which one to watch. The title and the thumbnail help me decide, but a third criteria popped up in my head - how long is the video?

So I was annoyed that this piece of information wasn't readily available.

But why not do something about that?

On my computer it turns out the thumbnails that the file manager (Nemo) shows are generated by totem-video-thumbnailer, via a configuration file in /usr/share/thumbnailers, so I set out to make a wrapper, that would put the duration into the thumbnail.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

# video-duration-thumbnailer - wrapper for totem-video-thumbnailer
#
#    Adds duration to the thumbnail.
#
#    Put this script somewhere, edit
#    /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer changing
#    "Exec=/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o" to
#    'Exec=YOURPATH/video-duration-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o'
#
#    Thanks to Klaus for the Python snippet for url decoding.
#
# Copyright (C) 2025. Under GPLv2. By Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk>

INPUT=$3
OUTPUT=$4

# Run the original thumbnailer:
/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer "$@"

# If possible, overlay duration:
if echo "$INPUT" | grep --quiet 'file://'; then
    FILE=$(echo "$INPUT" | python -c 'import sys; from urllib.parse import unquote; print(unquote(sys.stdin.read().strip()))')

    DURATION=$(ffprobe -i "$FILE" -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0" -sexagesimal | cut -d. -f 1)

    TMPFILE=$(mktemp -t vtt-XXXXXX)
    convert "$OUTPUT" -gravity SouthEast -font DejaVu-Sans-Condensed -pointsize 24 -fill white -stroke gray -annotate +2+2 "$DURATION" "$TMPFILE"
    mv "$TMPFILE" "$OUTPUT"
fi

And now when I look at a folder of videos the duration is shown (after pressing Ctrl-R to update the thumbnails)!