Video Display Troubleshooting Thumbnail and End of Video

[Gilson]

Is there a way to get the first frame of the video to show?  It seems to pick a random point in the video which may not convey well the topic of the video.

Alternately, is there a way to create a custom thumbnail to display before the video begins?

Even though my video ends with an image, the vidoe goes black after being played once, and the webpage looks awful with the big black box just sitting there.  Is there a way to fix that?

Thanks so much in advance for any help anyone has to offer.

Sincerely

[Adam7]

There isn't really a way with our HD Video element to specify which frame is used for the still image.   There are a few different third party solutions in our App Center: https://www.weebly.com/app-center/search/video

I'm not sure that any of those would have this as an option, but it might be worth checking out.

I'd also recommend posting this to our Vote on Features board if you'd like us to build in an option.

[bmarchky]

Adam,

I dont understand how this super basic option of customizing a video thumbnail isn't already implemented into the Weebly Pro subscription. I just bought the Pro subscription, and have spent the entire day converting from third-party to directly embedded video; now my website looks like trash.

This shouldn't be something that the consumers should have to vote for or reccommend. I'm sure you will be losing a large amount of users including myself. 

I appreciate Weebly for wasting my time.

Sincerely, 

Brian Marchky

[Bernadette3]

We're sorry for the frustration, Brian. This is a feature the team is considering, but we don't have an update on a timeframe for when this would be available.  I will be following up with the agent you spoke with earlier today to make sure we get you the proper refund for your plan. In the meantime you can upload your videos to Youtube and embed the html code, or you can use the Youtube element. Sorry again for the inconvenience. 

[Gilson]

I agree.  There are some basic functions missing from Weebly that make it inconvenient and clunky to use. There are some things which should be basic features, such as selecting a thumbnail like a roll over image or an expandable file system so that you can view and arrange files easily. It is confounding as to why Weebly does not put these basic features together. It would make such loyal customers who would become the best advertisers of their product. As it is, I not only don't recommend Weebly when people ask me about it, I tell them to find a better product.

I realize that you might want your video to play directly on your page, but I have as a work-around created my own thumbnail jpg which links to my video on YouTube. There are a couple of advantages to this. First, it makes the load time on the page faster, and secondly it allows me to see YouTube analytics of my videos. Still not the reason that I had signed up for Premium with Weebly.

[jdr578]

I feel like if you need to point a paid user to a 3rd party plugin - that's a sign that you need to be providing that feature.  Why should pro users have to incur the additional expense of a 3rd party plug in for something as simple as thumbnails on video? The 'we're considering it' answer is a dodge.  This isn't complicated or complex to implement, I've seen page after page of threads on this community group ask for this feature over the course of several years. 

Can we get a better answer that 'yeah, we're thinking about it.' ?

[jb333]

did you find a solution to this issue? 

[Yogama]

I've a similar problem. Some videos show a picture while not playing and some are just blank with a play button. It looks awful and I also just upgraded to pro to be able to display videos to members.

[Bernadette3]

Do the videos have an intro or cut screen? They will all show a still image from the same time stamp. I don't know the exact number, but I believe it is 2-3 seconds into the video. I know I've come across posts where people have suggested adding a still frame to the beginning of the video so that they can have a little more control over what displays. Maybe something like a logo? 

[CleaverGreene]

ha..ha...it is Nov.2021 and they still did not fix this! Do they even have a development team, or will this website stay the same until their server crashes some time and that will be it and we all move to shopify??

[juffee]

For anyone trying to solve this also, solved this by changing the background image of the banner wrap using css.

[weebleuse]

would you mind letting me know how to do that?

[Bazzamatraz]

I don't know if, after all this this time, it's still of any use to anyone now, but as the Administrator for a charity I have just had to fix this problem myself (as in, I wanted to show the first frame as the thumbnail - IMO this should be the default - but for some unknown reason Weebly's HD video always chooses a frame exactly 1 second into the video!).

So I ended up adding 1 second of blank frames to the start of my video using ffMPEG, and to do this without re-encoding, I followed the instructions on this forum advice page:

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/20717/ffmpeg-add-3-seconds-of-black-to-video-head-and-tail 

That forum post is for adding 3 seconds blank video to both at the start and end of an existing video, but I modified it as follows to insert 1 second of blank frames at the start of an existing video (without re-encoding - you have to download ffMPEG and run it in a command prompt in Windows, and then enter and run the following commands in the same folder that ffMPEG is installed):

ffmpeg -i fullvideo.mp4 -vf trim=0:1,geq=0:128:128 -af atrim=0:1,volume=0 -video_track_timescale 600 1sec.mp4

ffmpeg -i fullvideo.mp4 -c copy -video_track_timescale 600 full600.mp4

Create a notepad file named list.txt containing these lines:
file 1sec.mp4
file full600.mp4

Then finally run this command:

ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt -c copy merged.mp4

The resulting modified video is on this web page:

https://www.bathgatewayoutandabout.co.uk/upcoming-events.html 

scroll down to the first video (thumbnail is of a little girl holding up a 5 pound note in front of charity stall)

[Bernadette3]

Thanks for sharing, @Bazzamatraz ! ❤️