When a video is imported or uploaded, the system automatically generates 3 thumbnails of the video (beginning, middle, end). A lot of videos begin with a sort of fade up from black, and someone pointed out during my presentation last Friday, it might be neat if there was a way to avoid adding empty (all black) thumbnails.

To accomplish this, I compare the generated thumbnail with a plain black image that I store using RMagick, a Ruby wrapper for ImageMagick. Here’s the snippet of code that makes it happen:
def black(args = nil)
require 'RMagick'
src_black = Magick::ImageList.new(RAILS_ROOT+'/public/images/black.jpg')
source = Magick::ImageList.new(args[:path])
black = src_black.scale(source.columns, source.rows)
if source.difference(black)[1] < 0.01
return true
else
return false
end
end

The difference command only works when the images are of equal size, which is why I have the intermediary resize step. The difference method returns an array of values, and I found the ‘normalized mean error’ to be a pretty good indicator. When comparing a black thumbnail with the black image that value was on the order of 1 E -5 and a regular thumbnail generated a number in the range of .50-.90… so I opted for the 0.01 threshold. That should be enough to test for all black images, but still allow fairly dark shots thumbnails to pass through the system.