Support embedded thumbnail of video as the preview

[rieje]

What system are you running Yazi on?

Linux Wayland

What terminal are you running Yazi in?

Alacritty

yazi --debug output

N/A

Describe the question

Downloaded Youtube videos with yt-dlp contain thumbnails explicitly embedded into these files as e.g. image files as mkv attachments provide added context so file managers can show them instead of a thumbnail preview of the video generated for the video. They are meaningful, containing e.g. the topic of the video.

My GUI file manager (PCManFM) picks these up automatically and those that don't have embedded image files fallback to previewing the automatically generated one.

Yazi should be able to do that same. Currently it shows only the automatically generated one, which is rarely useful compared to the embedded thumbnail. For example, for a Youtube video series the automatically generated ones are just 99% pure white because they happen to be generated from a bad position (time) in the video whereas the Youtube thumbnail contains the topic's name.

Anything else?

No response

Checklist

• I have read all the documentation
• I have searched the existing discussions/issues

Originally posted by @rieje in #2506

[sxyazi]

Yazi uses ffmpeg to preview videos, is there any way to make ffmpeg prioritize the embedded thumbnail when it is available?

[maga-tama]

Check attached_pic disposition?

[sxyazi]

I tried to download a video using yt-dlp with --embed-thumbnail:

yt-dlp --embed-thumbnail 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXV98mzdXHc'

and then inspected it with ffprobe, but the attached_pic is always 0:

ffprobe -v quiet -select_streams v -show_entries stream=index,codec_name:stream_disposition=attached_pic -of json test.mkv
{
    "programs": [

    ],
    "stream_groups": [

    ],
    "streams": [
        {
            "index": 0,
            "codec_name": "av1",
            "disposition": {
                "attached_pic": 0
            }
        }
    ]
}

Is it that this YouTube video doesn't have an embedded thumbnail? Can you give me a URL that does have one?

[maga-tama]

yt-dlp -f137 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3a6dnS5sqU --embed-thumbnail
Works, could be Format/Container issue? (Any case - out of scope / yt-dlp issue)