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Assign .jpg to a video file

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 10:24 pm
by jr1734
Hi, I didn't see this addressed in any other forum, just figured to post it here and see if anyone had any suggestions.
I use WMC to record OTA NFL games of my team, then I use MCEBuddy to convert the .wts file to .mp4 . Then I upload it to OneDrive for my brother-in-law in New Zealand so he can watch the games. (Been doing this for about 20 years, used to mail VHS tapes!) Unfortunately, during the process, an image is apparently picked at random and assigned to the video file. Seems like about half the time, this is an image showing the scoreboard, sometimes the final score. Not optimal.
Is there a way to change the image that appears on a video file? Not an accompanying .jpg in the folder, but the actual image shown on the file. Thanks, Jeff

Re: Assign .jpg to a video file

Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 8:14 pm
by TheOsburnFamil
The short answer is no.

The longer answer is this is all dependent on each individual computer's demuxer, video decoder, and thumbnail generation process. There isn't a thumbnail metadata header in an actual file. You could have two computers side-by-side and nearly identical in most respects but one computer has something like the ffdshow codecs and another with the divx codecs, and they would select completely different locations in the video to generate the thumbnail from. Some codecs allow you to specify a specific time to pull from, but not an actual frame.

Of course-- I say all this based on my understanding of video file thumbnails, and I could be TOTALLY wrong... so if someone else knows better, I'd be interested to know myself. :)

Re: Assign .jpg to a video file

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:44 am
by DrSmith
I think the answer is yes, unless I misunderstand the problem. I normally use freemake video converter or handbrake to convert from .wtv to .mp4. But once the conversion is done I run mp3tag (yes that is a 3, not a 4) to embed my preferred thumbnail from jpg source. mp3tag is available here: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

mp4 file format is basically the same as mp3 with respect to tags. And Win7 and 10 display this embedded cover as the thumbnail for me.