Smarter Video Thumbnails from Meeting Integrations

Taylor Ralston

We have Zoom integrated and receive a lot of videos into Panopto. Sometimes users also upload Teams recordings (I know about the integration, we just haven't set it up yet). For Zoom meetings, we almost always spend the first couple of minutes of the recording waiting for people to arrive, meaning no screens are being shared (and usually no webcam video either). This results in a black screen with a user's name displayed in the middle. Teams has a gray "title page" for a few seconds before moving to the gallery of users.

For these meetings, to make it easier for users to find the one they want (usually remembering things like the screen shares), I have to go in an edit each video to find an appropriate screenshot to set as the thumbnail. The black/gray initial thumbnail is useless, and would almost not be worth having at all since it provides no additional information.

I'm proposing the idea of when a video is imported from a conferencing integration (and potential other sources if successful) that the process responsible for generating a thumbnail do a bit of analysis of the video and find the earliest frame that has an image that's mostly non-black and non-gray. It seems like the thumbnail engine doesn't always select the very first frame, because I've seen videos where it selects a frame anywhere between a few seconds to a minute or two into the video, so there must be some logic it's employing to select it. I'm asking that the logic be extended to find a thumbnail that isn't just a title/blank screen. This feature could be limited to just the integrations, or as a global setting for all imported videos, up to you.

There will be occasions I need to adjust the thumbnail to a "better" screenshot, but if this feature is implemented, I'd be doing this to drastically fewer videos than I am now.