TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Support for Android version of Total Commander

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Relentless
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TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *Relentless »

Hi Dev or Sup,

1. I'm using Lenovo M10 HD 2nd Gen tablet. TC keeps showing black thumbnails for a lot of video files. It's impossible to discern video files with the same initial file names. I have cleared thumbnail cache to trigger a media scan in the hopes of better thumbnails but in vain, the same black thumbnails for many video files keep showing.

To compare, MX Player and other music player apps show thumbnails of the video files. It's only TC-Android that show many black thumbnails for videos.

2. I also have to ask if Thumbnail Cache setting, that Cacheing thumbnails works or not? I ask this because while it always takes a looong few seconds for thumbnails, whether black or correct ones, to be generated, I find it disturbing that it takes about as much time for the same thumbnails to show every time the video file name is scrolled onscreen. This makes me wonder whether Cacheing Thumbnails setting works or not.

Black Thumbnails and Slow Rendering Thumbnails has actually persisted for 6 months now but I just kept on using TC because I couldn't be bothered to use another file manager with a different learning curve.

Good day. !



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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

1. I'm using the Android function to get a thumbnail from a video. If the video fades in from black, it will unfortunately have a black thumbnail. MX Player probably takes a frame a few seconds in. It's also possible that the thumbnail extraction failed because the video uses an unsupported codec like H265. Are you able to play the video with Total Commander's own player? If not, it means that the system video codecs included in your device do not support that format. Then thumbnail exctraction will fail too.

2. This makes no sense, maybe the cache is broken, or the extraction failed. But then it wouldn't take a few seconds to extract...
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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *Relentless »

Hi, thank you sir, for your quick reply and reverting the following info:.

1. My video files are now mostly matroska/webm, then about the same number of MP4 files and opus files. If I can't get the WEBM file of a video, I then proceed to get the MP4 and the OPUS files of the same video and MX Players can couple-play them both in sync. This is YouTube now.

2. So most of my files are now matroska/webm. Hmmm, come to think, I just noticed that TC Média Player is absent from the selection menu that comes whenever Open With is clicked on the Context Menu. There is MX Player, Android Player, but no TCM Player in the selection menu. I need to click back to Apps and choose TCM from there. TCM Player played the webm video without a hitch. Great actually but out sight, out of mind. It should show up in the selection menu among others.
3. Yes the video files with black thumbnails do indeed fade in from black. Can't something be done about this ? I changed the theme to dark to see how everything looks. But who am I fooling ? I don't even like dark theme and black thumbnails on dark theme is for me a change of lifestyle. Can't something be done with the thumbnails ?

3. TCM, MX Player, Android Players can play webm, opus, and MP4 files are 99% of my files. A few Avi, and Flv which can also be played without any problems. TCM can play my files.

4. The rendering of thumbnails is sluggish and there is no improvement in rendering speed with Cache Thumbnails enabled or not. I unclicked it when I sent you the first email earlier. No difference in speed.

Best regards,




2. Opus files
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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

Thanks for the extra info! webm is currently not supported in my player because only very few phones can play it with the internal codecs uses by my player. I can either signal support for webm on all devices or on none, I cannot signal it only on supported devices. That's because the supported file types must be listed in the AndroidManifest file.

Regarding the black video thumbnails, I will check whether there is a way to use a different frame than the first.
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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *Relentless »

1. Ahh, so TCM is this therefore playing webm files as MP4 files. Good to know.

2. Most likely Cache Thumbnails setting does not work or it may be broken in Android 10 which my tablet is. The same slow rendering of thumbnails occurs with my friend's smartphone of the same Android 10. I don't know about other Android versions though.

3. About the black thumbnails, thank you in advance for you efforts. I'm actually surprised to be communicating with the you Mr. Ghistler and in quite speedy replies too, and so altogether taken thank you again Dev !

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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

1. No, it plays them as webm, but not all Android devices have the necessary codecs. You can change the extension to mp4, though, then players supporting mp4 will play them too.

3. I will use function metadataRetriever.getFrameAtTime with options "10 seconds" and OPTION_NEXT_SYNC to get the next key frame after the first 10 seconds of the video. This way we should at least be past the fade in time. What do you think?
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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *Relentless »

1. Good to know about this.

2. Right after ten seconds should be great. I tested many music videos anyway. Andrea Bocelli was escorted to the mic and was there on the 9th sec. It should be good.

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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *Relentless »

Mr. Ghistler,

Sir, you really went above and beyond my expectations with regards to my initial request. It's perfect ! The thumbnails are even better than MX Player quite frankly. And the thumbnails immediately flash each time the directories are opened now that cacheing thumbnails setting works. This is the kind of support that makes me proud I'm using Total Commander.

Thank you again !


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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *ghisler(Author) »

I have to thank you too for reporting the problem. Many people don't bother and hope that someone else will report it. I never had this problem myself, because I only have videos from my phone camera on the device - and they never start with a black frame.
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Re: TC Android is showing so many black thumbnails for video files

Post by *DrShark »

history2beta.txt wrote:2021-09-23 Fixed: Don't load video thumbnails at 10 seconds of the video on Android 4.4 or older, some videos can cause a crash which cannot be caught
Since TC4A cannot catch these crashes, they can lead to crash loops making TC4A crash immediately after start (e.g. if it crashes when the videos are in both panels). I had these crashes on Android 4.3.1 device. Unfortunately, such crashes happen in Android itself, but Google didn't specify when it was fixed in a note to its closed bugreport. So Christian decided to disable "thumbnails at 10 seconds of the video" feature for all Android 4.x and older devices. There's a chance that as an option this feature will be restored in future TC4A versions, but since this will at least require translations, it won't happen in TC4A 3.24 which is a bugfix release.
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