On-the-fly thumbnail generation

Feature Suggestions
1

Creating thumbnails for a show as it is being recorded would be awesome. I came from Youtube TV and loved that I could see thumbnails as I fast forwarded through a game that was is progress. Makes it so much easier to find the end of a commercial.

2

YES! This. Please.

I’m just working on cutting the cord, so I’m new to Plex. This is probably the most frustrating of Plex’s current “personality quirks” since it makes time-shifting live TV very frustrating. Discovering that I have to wait until the recording is complete for thumbnails to generate is a genuine source of “culture shock” for me, coming from satellite and cable company DVRs that do this and have done it since the beginning.

3

Could you please add the ability to tap to skip whilst playing video, rather than having to pause it first, and for a thumbnail to appear so that skipping commercials is easier

4

I agree. Playback of a show currently being recorded (time shifting) is very buggy on Apple TV. Sometimes play/pause doesn’t work and other times clicking the touchpad doesn’t respond.
Also, I have the option to create thumbnails enabled in server settings but I have never seen anything but a black rectangle when scrubbing through a show (already recorded, or time shifting).

3 Likes
5

Problem statement:

My current user experience with Live TV is very poor (using HDHomerun). Besides hanging often while seeking only having a 30s forward / 10s backward option is very limiting without thumbnails being shown (like the option for postprocessed finished recordings).

Proposed feature/solution:

Making the user interface more consistent by showing the progress bar while seeking in a live or recorded show and showing thumbnails generated on-the-fly for seeking with preview (if available).

This matches the feature of nearly all online streaming services for live TV and videos. Youtube TV for example typically has a small delay when catching up with the ‘live’ recording but you can seek smoothly with the preview in any part of the recording that is less than a few minutes from live TV time.

I understand that some systems may not have the required performance to create live TV thumbnails so an automatic fallback to seeking without thumbnails would be great for those cases.