If you want to promote your videos then you should give your video screen capture or snapshot to your customer. So they can see the quality of the videos and how the videos look before they buy them. In Windows you can use Windows Media Player Classic to do so, you can refer to my post to see how to do that. In Ubuntu you can do so too, but you don’t need a media player to capture it. You can do it from the command line.
We are going to use mtn to make screen captures of your videos. Why mtn? Here are the reasons:
- No GUI required
- Simple to use
- Very fast time of getting captures: 0.5-5 seconds (on standard settings)
So here are the steps to install it:
1. Open your terminal and update your repositories:
sudo apt-get update2. Install these libraries:
sudo apt-get install -y libgd2 libavcodec libavformat libavutil libswscale3. Download and unpack movie thumbnailer (mtn) binary: http://rapidshare.com/files/344568205/mtn.rar
4. Give the mtn file execute permission:
chmod +x mtn5. Alias it:
vim /home/[your_user_name]/.bashrcadd this line:
alias mtn='/[path to your mtn folder]/mtn'6. Installation Done
How to use it:
1. Simple use:
mtn moviename.avi2. If you get a fonts error you can use this command:
mtn moviename.avi -f /var/lib/defoma/gs.d/dirs/fonts/VeraBd.ttfUseful parameters:
-b 0.80 – will skip screen cap if 80% of screen is blank
-c x – use a number instead of x, that’s number of columns
-j 90 – jpeg quality in %
-r x – number of rows, same as columns
-T text – add text above output image
For more options please check out the mtn page here. Download for Windows also available