[HOW TO] Fix broken thumbnails of videos in Nautilus/Files

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1

So recently I had an issue where thumbnails of videos weren't loading at all in the Zorin file browser (officially known as Nautilus.)

It's probably an issue with my video player, since I use mpv instead of VLC. However, I found this trick in an Ubuntu Help thread:

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

This package seems to handle thumbnail generation of pretty much any kind of video!

Going into the Nautilus preferences (located under the menu with the three-line button) and raising the "Thumbnails only for files smaller than" value (under "Search & Preview") to something like 50 MB would also be a good idea.

After you do all that, hit refresh in your folder and watch all your videos gain thumbnails again! Wow!

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2

I like this. Another possibility is to install Nemo or another file manager. Nautilus is not worth keeping and most of the integration you find there can be found in other file managers even if by third party tools.

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Nautilus doesn't use either of them as backends for anything, for Video processing, 99% of programs will be using ffmpeg or extensions to ffmpeg

(Like ffmpegthumbnailer as you showed us)