Thumbnails for Videos in Google Drive

Hello everybody, I’ve been playing around with Glide for a long time but never really came across something I couldn’t figure out. Until today

So I am building a video-course type app where users browse trough content and watch videos. Videos are hosted in Google Drive but they don’t carry any thumbnail with them and I can’t seem to figure out how to have the thumbnails appear before the user hits play. As a result of this, the video (in details view) remains a black square with a play button in the middle until it is played

I am not interested in having the videos hosted in YouTube as it suggests videos at the end and I am not after that.

Has anybody come across this and do you think there’s a solution to display the video thumbnail (or custom thumbnail) before the play button is clicked for Videos in Google Drive?

Google Drive videos should have thumbnails auto generated.

The only time you wont see them is when they’re part of an inline list (no videos do this automatically). However you can always specify an image (that would be housed in a separate column) to act as the “thumbnail” prior to diving into the details screen.

My issue is that the videos are already into the Details section and I’m using a video as a Home page welcome-type video. By default they are displayed black (unlike Youtube videos)

https://prnt.sc/shar8m - Home screen

https://prnt.sc/sharnq - Details screen

Is the first frame in your video black (fade in)?

Thanks, this is it. Videos fade in from black indeed

Now back to re-do 40’s of videos

I bet if you were to create a promo image of the video and add it as the first frame (even if only 0.5 seconds long) prior to the fade in, you’d see it as the thumbnail of the video.

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That would be an ideal way to do it.

Found a link about adding new thumbnails to metadata via Python:

https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/file#uploading_thumbnails

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Here’s my attempt with Cloudinary.