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I just added the ability for users of my website to link to mpeg-dash videos hosted on other sites. The videos work great. However, the video/image sharing functionality on my site depends on having access to a thumbnail (still) image of any content that is shared. With mpeg-dash, I don't know of a built-in way to get a still image. I assumed I would find a jpeg representation in the mpd files, but this appears to be merely a proposed addition to the mpeg-dash format that no one is yet using. Note that I have no control over the mpd that I use -- it comes from another site, and I have to use what I'm given.

Is there a built-in way to fetch a thumbnail from a mpeg-dash video? If not, how might I go about making a thumbnail? My back-end language is php, if that matters.

Haydentech
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If the videos are posted on other sites then you can set the preload to 'Auto' in your HTML5 tag on your web page and this will usually display the first frame of the video as a thumbnail. This works with most of the common DASH players:

<video controls preload="auto">

Note - you need to make sure you don't set a poster attribute also.

If you have access to the videos and actually want to generate the thumbnails on the server side, so you can add the images as a poster then there are some approaches using ffmpeg that can help with this in PHP - see these answers for more info:

Mick
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