[Feature] Video thumbnails/lower resolutions + quality controls in the viewer

[Atemu]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

Even transcoded videos can often load too slowly or you might sometimes be in network conditions where any decent quality video would be infeasible to load.

You could reduce the global maximum transcode bitrate to mitigate this of course but that also reduces the maximum quality you could hope to see in any video in all situations quite drastically which is not ideal; I want more than low resolution mush in most cases.
Sometimes, I don't actually need all that much quality and am just browsing or quickly want to skim a video's content. I could also see myself in a network situation where all I could hope to feasibly load is mush and that'd be so much better than nothing.
It'd be very useful to have a "thumbnail-sized" transcode in addition to the "compatibility" transcode for these cases. (This should also be used for playback on hover.)

Sometimes, I do also want to view a video in all its glory though because some detail matters and am fine with waiting for it to load the original file. This is also impossible currently. If you're not on mobile and have the file locally, you get the transcode unconditionally; whatever quality it happens to be.

We have a tried and true solution for this: Multiple quality settings.

This way we could have original quality video for eye candy, transcoded medium quality format video for compatibility and low-res thumbnail video for quick loading and very shitty connections and be able to choose the appropriate one depending on our situation.
Because you would always have the option to view the original file if you need high quality, you could then also decrease the transcoded video quality to something more palatable in okay connections such as 1080p 4-6Mbit/s or even slightly lower.

This would be analogue to how we have original, preview and thumbnail quality for pictures. (The same UI could also be re-used here I suppose; allowing you to choose the quality of static pictures too.)

You could even have fancy automatic quality control like you're used to from youtube but that sounds like a phase 2 feature.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[bo0tzz]

#7666

[Atemu]

Hm, that's slightly different; it asks for real-time transcodes. What I describe is still ahead-of-time transcodes like we have already, just with multiple quality levels; just like with images.

This could be considered a precursor to real-time transcodes in some ways though.

The reason I see it separately is that it's not feasible or desirable to do real-time transcoding in many cases. Making real-time transcodes a thing also seems quite a bit more complex than adding a second quality level to the existing ahead-of-time infra to me but I have not looked at the code yet.

[gyscos]

Hi! I'm also interested in this feature. Was the discussion really closed as duplicate? This discussion is not about on-demand or real-time video generation, which was the main point of #7666. It's actually quite the opposite - #7666 was about saving space by only generating the video when needed instead of ahead of time. This discussion is about using more space by pre-generating multiple versions of the video.