Preview bar with images

[VolodymyrYeletskyi]

Does Media3 has an option to get video frames and show them while user rewinds video like in Youtube?

[rohitjoins]

@VolodymyrYeletskyi,

The question has multiple layers to consider:

• Use of trick play tracks that contain only sparse i-frames to support fast back and forward seeking
• UI support that displays these trick play tracks as thumbnails above the scrubber.

There was a recent question to support being able to extract thumbnails from a video on-device which can be an alternative to the i-frame trick play for a media that doesn't have it(obviously this won't work for live streams as the whole piece of media should be loaded locally). Currently, there are no plans to provide this feature.

Regarding trick play support, google/ExoPlayer#3752 is tracking support for DASH. We would like to extend this support for other formats in the future.

As for UI support, I think it is a niche use case, and at the moment, there are no plans to prioritise its implementation. However, high-quality pull requests for this feature are welcome. I'm going to keep this issue open, marked as a low priority enhancement.

[prashantchothani]

This feature is very useful and is now default in all players and apps. MPEG-DASH trick play adaptation set if available, then the Player UI should have this functionality.

[tonihei]

google/ExoPlayer#3752 is a catch-all feature tracker for trick-play related logic. If you look at the list in google/ExoPlayer#3752 (comment), it also includes the UI elements for it. I think we can duplicate this issue against the other one given they are all part of the larger effort to support trick play in the player.

[prashantchothani]

@tonihei in exoplayer2 the feature tracker was finished and there was a PR merged for work done by fraunhoferfokus as below:

google/ExoPlayer#10793

Is this available in Media3 as well, since Media3 continues after Exoplayer versions ?

[icbaker]

@prashantchothani The media3 and exoplayer2 code bases have a single source-of-truth, so changes in exoplayer2 are mirrored in media3. In this specific case, google/ExoPlayer#10793 is merged in media3 in c6569a3 and that was then cherrypicked into the 1.0.0-rc01 release in d49bd45.

[prashantchothani]

@icbaker Thanks a lot for letting me know this. Does that mean that if the manifest has the Image Adaptation Sets Track, the Thumbails would appear onScrubbing when we use media3 ? Thanks once again in advance.

[tonihei]

So far we also parse the image track information from the manifest and nothing more. The remaining improvements are tracked by google/ExoPlayer#3752 (comment) as pointed out above.