Thumbnail extraction
Any player that can play a video media file can also extract thumbnails from it. That is how we can generate a thumbnail from an R3D file, for example.
Additionally, there is an FFmpeg command line thumbnail extractor that is available as a fallback for many file formats if the native helper is not available. This is particular useful for the Worker on Linux which doesn’t currently have a native helper.
The FFmpeg command line is also used to extract an audio waveform thumbnail for audio only files such as WAV.
For non-media files we also extract the native operating system icon. This uses native code on Mac and can extract high resolution thumbnails, whereas on Windows it is limited to very low resolution 16x16 or 32x32 icons and so we disable the feature on Windows by default.