If you’ve been seeing a strip of thumbnails along the bottom of YouTube videos lately, you’re not seeing things.
The site has been quietly rolling out a feature that automatically generates thumbnails of every moment in a video, laying them all out the way a video-editing app like iMovie would.
When you’re just sitting back and watching, the thumbnails are invisible. But try dragging the playback dot along the red strip at the bottom of the video to find an exact frame.
If you hover your mouse pointer anywhere on the red strip, a thumbnail of that specific moment pops up, letting you easily see what you’ll see before you jump.
YouTube product manager Nundu Janakiram says the site introduced the feature because many users were trying to find exact moments, or see a particular moment in context with the rest of the video. There was a more subtle motivator, too.
“You’re at your computer and everything on this page is very interactive. You can subscribe, you can like, you can leave a comment, you can click on related videos. We wanted to make the video itself feel interactive, so it doesn’t feel like just this black box.”
For some of YouTube’s long-form content, the standard red strip doesn’t quite give users precise control to really target a specific moment. With videos longer than 90 minutes, a secondary slider appears when mousing over, so a user can zero in on moments like so:
The thumbnails feature isn’t on every video yet — Janakiram says they’re limited to just some videos with more than 1,000 views. The feature is available worldwide. The goal is to eventually bring thumbnails to all videos on the site.
Considering over an hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, that’s a lot of thumbnails. The task of creating, storing and serving up that many images is something only a company on the scale of Google can achieve. And even then it’s pretty hard.
“One of the big challenges was we didn’t want to compromise on the speed at which we serve these images, or the quality,” says Nils Krahnstoever, the software engineer responsible for scaling the thumbnails to YouTube vast amount of video. “The system actually provides images at multiple resolutions — initially when you [mouseover a point] you see a lower-resolution version of the image, but we increase the resolution of it as we fetch additional data.”
“That’s especially cool,” Janakiram said. “We generate tons of these thumbnails, yet when you use this feature it feels almost magical. If there was a lag, it would really detract from the user experience.”
As magical as the new thumbnails are, there’s one thing they can’t do: give you more options for the representative thumb when you upload a video. The storyboards aren’t tied to uploading, so you still only get three to choose from.
Also, you won’t be able to see the thumbnails on mobile devices, though Janakiram says they’re exploring it.
How do you like YouTube’s new thumbnail feature? Let us know in the comments.
Source: Mashable
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