I’m all Plex (Lifetime Pass Owner since 2016) with powerful PMS on FreeNAS, yet I have to say that it is really a shame that 4 years (!) after acknowledging the problem, Plex on Apple TV – I’m currently on ATV 4K – still does not support Video Thumbnails while scrubbing the timeline:
On the other hand Infuse 6 (Pro) on Apple TV does show thumbnails, and even generates those on-the-fly regardless of the source file format/codec, so doesn’t occupy any additional disk space for pre-rendered thumbnails (BIFs). (Overall the Infuse 6 decoding & playback core seems to be much more solid than what we are seeing with Plex):
@elanSo the big question is: How many more years do we have to wait, until we see the same performance as in Infuse? I’m just not willing to spend another USD/EUR 60 for an Infuse Lifetime Pass.
I mean it’s not as if Apple TV would be some unimportant playback device for Plex with small market share…
same with me, worked fine for a while then stopped after a recent update. If you hit pause, you can see the preview, so they are there, but it disappears when you fast forward.
I agree, it would be really nice to have this; it used to be quite hard because the Apple TV player needed the thumbnails in a very specific format we didn’t support, but now that we have the new custom player it should be a lot easier. I’ll ask around
Actually, I think I confused myself, video preview thumbnails are working for me in the new player, and we’ve recently applied the new seek overlay to the built-in player too, so this should work fine.
(This means we rely on the server-generated thumbnails universally now, so we don’t need the Apple format, but you do need to ensure your server is making them.)
The server is definitely making the thumbnails. To double-check, I used the Plex App on my Samsung TV and preview thumbnails display properly. So, this seems to be an issue with the Apple TV 4K app. I am on tvOS 13.3.1. I tried the new player and old player with the same results. Can you confirm that video preview thumbnails with the app running on tvOS 13.3.1 are working for you?
Unlikely, because it would be specifically for the AppleTV, as opposed to all the clients. We’ve recently released an update which makes generating the previews much faster on the server side.
What would be the reason for wanting them on-the-fly?
Well a long time ago when they were so hugely slow and CPU intensive that would have seemed a crazy question.
Nowadays not so much.
As a side note I just wanna say thanks to all the devs for making VP thumbs a joy to use in the Shield. They really were truly awful compared to the ATV in the past.
Finally the one issue I have with VP thumbs is the actual generation. Sure, there’s scheduled tasks (with or without the “newly added media” option, but beyond that as an example.
You suddenly discover the joys of a show that’s actually a couple (or more) seasons old.
The only way to force generate them is to analyse episode by episode.
I really would love to be able to click analyse at show level (even season level would help) and have it generate the thumbs for that show (or season).
It’s painful having to force them by episode…more so for shows with 23/24 episodes per season.
Anyway… I’m nit picking.
The work done at server level with VP thumbs is truly impressive.
This text on the settings page might need updating then ;^)
Video preview thumbnails provide live updates in Now Playing and while seeking on supported apps. Thumbnail generation may take a long time, cause high CPU usage, and consume additional disk space. You can turn off thumbnail generation for individual libraries in the library’s advanced settings.
A good point that irritated me to hell in my early Plex days.
Putting myself back in a new users shoes, then a couple of hundred GB on the default setup of Plex Metadata residing on the OS drive is gonna be quite scary.
That said I’m at 128GB on 110TB of media. No idea how much has still to be generated sadly.
with the new more efficient thumbnail generator, perhaps it is time to rethink why or if statically stored thumbnails are needed, when they can now be generated extremely quickly with low overhead, stored temporarily (much like a transcode stream chunks), then discarded with in a reasonable caching period.
I am currently generating a du -hsc on my plex data folder, to show the disk space usage that statically thumbnails cost the user. Once that completes I’ll follow up with the data.
I propose that instead of statically and permanently storing thumbnail images, that they be generated dynamically upon start of a video, cached temporarily, then trimmed after a reasonable set of hours/days/weeks, or by a set cache size limit (ie set thumbnail cache to 1-10 gigabytes max disk usage).
it might even better to have 2 different caches, or different reasons to generate them…
generate thumbs upon new content (to expire tbd)
generate thumbs upon playback of content (to expire after ## of hours/days/weeks after playback)
