I read this Upload video and extract thumbnail using Amazon s3 but I think answer is really complicated.
I'm searching for simple solution to get a thumbnail from an already uploaded video on Amazon S3.
When a user place in a form a video URL I want to somehow fetch the thumbnail and display it like an image with a link to the original video and my only problem is to get that thumbnail in a proper way.
You can create a thumbnail in Javascript on the client side when you stream the video from the server - there are some good examples of this available such as: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29806483/334402.
Your browser will also generally automatically create a thumbnail for any video you include but do not start to play.
You need to be aware that, creating the thumbnail this way, means that the client needs to download the video header information and enough frames of the video to generate a good thumbnail.
It does not have to download the whole video however, as most videos will support some form of streaming allowing the browser to only request a small portion of the video.
Most commercial video services will generate the thumbnail on the server side, typically when the video is loaded. This is partly to allow quicker and easier download of thumbnails, and also to enable quality control - i.e. someone to check the thumbnail is actually a good one.
