Archive:Create video-preview thumbnails manually

The following instructions explains how you can create preview-thumbnails of your movies and/or TV-episodes.
This is especially useful for TV-episodes when you can't remember what is going on in each episode.

You need to have FFmpeg installed on your PC in order to create the video-preview thumbnails!
Also make sure that FFmpeg is set in your PATH environment-variable (or just copy the ffmpeg.exe to your \windows\system32 directory).

Then open a command-prompt window, navigate to the folder where your videos are located and type in the following:

for %i in (*.avi) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -f mjpeg -t 0.001 -ss 5 -y "%~ni.tbn"

That goes through all the avi files in the folder and creates a jpeg-file (actually with a .tbn extension for XBMC) of the frame 5 seconds in, with the same name as the avi.
You can change the number after '-ss' to change how far (in seconds) from the beginning you want the preview-screenshot to be taken.
Change '*.avi' to whatever the extension of your videos are.
Then finally, set that folder in XBMC to show in thumbs view and you're away!

If you want to create preview-thumbnails of the current folder and all of its subfolders, then do the following command:

for /r %i in (*.avi) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -f mjpeg -t 0.001 -ss 5 -y "%~di%~pi%~ni.tbn"