How To Enable Video Thumbnails/Icons In Thunar (and Remove Ugly Moviestrips)

Hello friends, I was tweaking my Arch install the other day and ran into a few bumps getting thumbnails to work and look nice. Here’s what worked for me.

TL;DR for Busy Bees 🐝:

• Install thunar, tumbler and ffmpegthumbnailer with your package manager of choice
• Copy default configuration file /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc to ~/.config/tumbler/
• Edit the new configuration file and disable the ffmpegthumbnailer plugin
• Copy the default thumbnailer file /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer to ~/.local/thumbnailers/
• Edit the new thumbnailer file and remove the -f flag from the exec command
• Delete your cache directory (~/.cache/thumbnails) and restart

Prerequisites

To get video thumbnails to work at all you will need to install the following packages:

• thunar: The actual file manager
• tumbler: Thumbnail manager
• ffmpegthumbnailer: Creates thumbnails out of videos

# For Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S thunar tumbler ffmpegthumbnailer

# For Ubuntu
sudo apt install thunar tumbler ffmpegthumbnailer

Remove Moviestripping

If you completed the above, you should now see the following after restarting Thunar:

For some of you this might look good. I myself can’t stand those black moviestip bars on either side of each thumbnail. If you are like me then you are in luck; for this last section of the guide I will show you how to make your thumbnails look like this:

Changing the Thunar Configuration:

Check out the xfce documentation if you want to figure this out by yourself. Otherwise you can just follow along with me.

First you are going to want to copy the default configuration file /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc to ~/.config/tumbler/

If ~/.config/tumbler/ doesn’t already exist go ahead and create it:

mkdir -p ~/.config/tumbler/

Then copy over the default configuration file:

cp /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc ~/.config/tumbler/

Next we’re going to need to disable the ffmpeghumbnailer plugin in this config.

Open up out new config file in your text editor of choice:

nano ~/.config/tumbler/tumbler.rc

In the configuration file ~/.config/tumbler/tumbler.rc, you’ll find various settings related to thumbnail generation. Specifically, we’re interested in the [FfmpegThumbnailer] section. Below is an example excerpt from the default configuration:

...
[FfmpegThumbnailer]
Disabled=false
Priority=2
Locations=
MaxFileSize=0
...

By default, Disabled is set to false, indicating that the ffmpegthumbnailer plugin is enabled. To disable it, simply change false to true like so:

...
Disabled=true
...

Create a Custom Thumbnailer:

We are going to need to create our own custom thumbnailer file to override the defaults now. The process is really similar to the above, so I won’t go into too much detail.

# Create local thumbnailers directory if it does not already exist
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/

# Copy default thumbnailer file
cp /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/

# Edit the new thumbnailer file
nano ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

In here we are going to want to find the line

...
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -i %i -o %o -s %s -f
...

and remove the -f flag like so:

...
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -i %i -o %o -s %s
...

Doing so stops ffmpegthumbnailer from drawing those ugly back bars all over our thumbnails and leave us with nice clean images. Remember to clear your cached thumbnails and restart Thunar and Tumbler in order to reflect the results. You can clear your cache like so:

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails

Tumbler can be ‘restarted’ with:

pkill tumblerd

Got any questions or need further assistance? Feel free to drop a comment below, and I’ll be more than happy to help. Happy tweaking!