The current thumbnail generation code runs in the same process as the web request to generate the thumbnails. Its much easier to extract a thumbnail image in the same code that creates the thumbnail object, and it worked pretty fast for a lot of my smaller test files. Now that I’ve started to work with larger and longer files, I’ve found the thumbnail generation process (which is handled via this command ffmpeg -i file.avi -y -deinterlace -f image2 -ss 00:12:34 image.jpg) has been too slow to be acceptable. I imagine that as video codecs get more complicated to compress video and maintain quality, the method to extract a single frame in the middle of a stream gets harder.

To fix this I’m going to have to re-write the thumbnail generation to be handled like video conversion and run as a background job. It unfortunately won’t present users with their thumbnails as quickly as I’d like (no one like to see a page saying “In Progress…”) but it should fix the long load times and subsequent timeouts caused by thumbnail generation.