MediaPlayerElement control with seekbar mouse hover thumbnails

[touseefbsb]

I'm submitting a...

Feature request (UserVoice request: )

Current behavior

Currently when we hover over the seekbar of mediaplayerelement there is no thumbnail shown up.

Expected behavior

This feature is almost available in any web based video player or any Desktop based video player, the feature is simple. When a mediaplayerelement is playing or paused a video. and the user hover overs the seekbar, with mouse, or pen or any other input device for that perspective, wherver is the user mouse, show a small thumbnail of the video file at that specific position, just above the seekbar ( slider ) and as the user moves the mouse along the seekbar, the thumbnail should update accordingly.

UserVoice Link

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/suggestions/33419554-mediaplayerelement-seekbar-hover-thumbnail

StackOverflow Link

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44598082/uwp-media-element-seekbar-pointer-hover-frame-show

Not sure whether this feature is supposed to be in the toolkit, as it is a specific use case, but also a very common use case, so that is why I am suggesting it.

[JohnnyWestlake]

For what it's worth, most web based systems tend to use a pre-generated thumbnail sheet / file for performance reasons. Whilst you can certainly generate the thumbnails on the fly every single time a video is played, it's a bit... expensive? I'm guessing you'd want the latter rather than support for the former?

[touseefbsb]

well the aim is to get the same functionality, for example as youtube has, but you are right creating thumbnails on the fly can be expensive and generating a thumbnail sheet before hand can be helpful. I just want the support for the functionality, I am not sure which is the best way to do it though, or which should be a preference to include in the toolkit. @JohnnyWestlake

[lucaasrojas]

Whats the current status?

[touseefbsb]

@nmetulev the uservoice entry has 7 votes, how much we might need to take this into consideration?

[michael-hawker]

@vgromfeld thought this one might be up your alley for knowing a bit more on the technical side. Do you think anything like this is possible to hook into the MediaPlayerElement control or would this just be a ton of custom work?

[vgromfeld]

The MediaTransportControls.ThumbnailRequested event mentioned in the linked stack overflow post is a good way to provide the image to the MediaPlayerElement.

TimedMetadataTrack Class can be interesting to associate the thumbnails to the media stream

Retrieving the frames remains the most complicated part:

• We can turn on MediaPlayer.IsVideoFrameServerEnabled to extract the frames for the thumbnails and then turned it back off to let it play.
• Another option is to use MediaComposition. This option seems easier and more tailored to thumbnails extraction. (See this Stackoverflow question for more details). It should be something that we can run in the background while playing the file so not delaying and not interfering too much with the playback.

Both options still require us to read the video file twice (once to extract all the thumbnails, once to play it).