Enabling Video Thumbnail Previews in Dolphin

Just a quickie here – if you keep video of any kind on your Kubuntu 9.10 system, you may have noticed that the Dolphin file manager doesn’t show thumbnail previews of video files by default.  Turns out that it’s a very easy (if non-obvious) feature to enable. Simply follow these steps:

  1. Open up kPackageKit
  2. Search for and install the package mplayerthumbs – it has three dependencies, which include mplayer itself (I use VLC, but to each his own)
  3. Back in Dolphin, navigate to Settings > Configure Dolphin > General > Previews Tab
  4. Scroll down in the list, and you should be able to see an option called Video Files (MPlayerThumbs) – Check that box
  5. Drag the Maximum file size slider all the way to the right, and hit apply

Navigate to a folder that contains video files, and watch as they slowly begin to populate. Be patient though, it can take a few minutes if you have a lot of media. You should also note that it doesn’t work with all WMV files.

Thanks to youTube user gotbletu for the following informative video that I ripped these instructions off from:



3 Comments

  1. I will recommend using “kffmpegthumbnailer” instead of “(MPlayerThumbs) “. “Kffmpegthumbnailer” works faster on Ubuntu 12.04.

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