Quicktime Movie thumbnailer for Mediawiki

Here’s a basic mediawiki extension to render thumbnails for quicktime (.mov) files.

Mediawiki (the engine that powers Wikipedia) doesn’t understand Quicktime files by default, so doesn’t produce thumbnails for them.  I hacked together this extension to create thumbnails for the movies so you can browse through snapshots of the movies in the search results, media page etc.  It’s based on loosely on PNGHandler extension by Bryan Tong Minh, and uses ffmpeg to generate the thumbnails.

Here’s a gallery page before and after installing the extension:

Gallery without movhandler installed

Gallery with movhandler installed

And here’s a media page:

Media page without movhandler installed

Media page with movhandler installed

The movhandler extension also reports the size, framerate, encoder and bitrate of the quicktime file. It does not embed the movies themselves in the thumbnails (that would be too slow—especially for galleries), but if you click through the media page, the movie file will play in the browser.

You can download the extension here: movhandler repository

To install, make a directory called movhandler under your extensions directory, put the files in there, then add this line to Localsettings.php:

require_once("$IP/extensions/movhandler/movhandler.php");

Let me know if you find it useful, or make any improvements to the code.