Roughly how big are these files, and are they stored locally on your machine or mounted over the network (using FUSE, GVFS, or a kernel-based one like NFS?)
I've noticed a few linux file managers are quite cautious loading multimedia thumbnails for networked filesystems mounted with GVFS, not sure of a fix for that aside from looking for a command line utility to mount using FUSE instead
These files are anywhere between 600 MB to 1.5 GB in size and thet are stored locally on my PC.
Make sure you have all the free and non-free video codecs installed
Which ones in specefic?
Which one are your files encoded with?
(You can check this by running ffprobe on the file.)
Shoot can't install it because it's probably in a repository that is not listed in my sources
ffprobe is included in the ffmpeg package. For future reference you can find what package contains a file by doing dpkg-query -S /bin/ffprobe (note that the path you give it is relative to /usr)
Got the command to work. Here's the info for one of the files for which a preview thumbnail/icon isn't available:
Looks like that video is encoded H.264, which according to Google is one of the codecs that Debian only makes available via third party repository.
Here are instructions from debian.org for installing the codec by manually downloading and installing a single package file:
And here are instructions from a third party explaining how to tell apt how to install them so they can be kept up to date (be sure you read the warning on the debian.org page about why they don't tell you to do that before you do it):
Depending on how exactly your file manager works, installing the codec may or may not be sufficient to display thumbnails. If not, there are probably instructions specific to your file manager for installing the appropriate plugin.
I have been installing the codecs through the Software app. Should I delete them and then install through the terminal?
Btw here are the codecs I have installed through the Software app:
You have openh264 installed already which should cover your bases. Since it quite clearly isn't I'm not sure what to suggest. What file manager is this that's having issues?
Ext4
Ext4 is a filesystem. That is the part of the kernel that actually stores and retrieves the files on disk. What program are you using to browse files? It's a bit hard to tell from this screenshot what program it's a screenshot of, but it looks like Nautilus (the default file browser in GNOME). Is that it?
lol, no :)
first of all, it only searches for occurrences in already installed packages and is more or less a grep -l xxx /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list. So you can't use it in order to determine which package to install, for that you use https://packages.debian.org or apt-file instead.
Secondly, what you search for isn't relative to anything (wtf):
Roughly how big are these files, and are they stored locally on your machine or mounted over the network (using FUSE, GVFS, or a kernel-based one like NFS?)
I've noticed a few linux file managers are quite cautious loading multimedia thumbnails for networked filesystems mounted with GVFS, not sure of a fix for that aside from looking for a command line utility to mount using FUSE instead
These files are anywhere between 600 MB to 1.5 GB in size and thet are stored locally on my PC.
Make sure you have all the free and non-free video codecs installed
Which ones in specefic?
Which one are your files encoded with?
(You can check this by running ffprobe on the file.)
Shoot can't install it because it's probably in a repository that is not listed in my sources
ffprobe is included in the ffmpeg package. For future reference you can find what package contains a file by doing
dpkg-query -S /bin/ffprobe(note that the path you give it is relative to /usr)Got the command to work. Here's the info for one of the files for which a preview thumbnail/icon isn't available:
Looks like that video is encoded H.264, which according to Google is one of the codecs that Debian only makes available via third party repository.
Here are instructions from debian.org for installing the codec by manually downloading and installing a single package file:
https://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs
And here are instructions from a third party explaining how to tell apt how to install them so they can be kept up to date (be sure you read the warning on the debian.org page about why they don't tell you to do that before you do it):
https://www.debiantutorials.com/how-to-install-ffmpeg-with-h-264mpeg-4-avc/
Depending on how exactly your file manager works, installing the codec may or may not be sufficient to display thumbnails. If not, there are probably instructions specific to your file manager for installing the appropriate plugin.
I have been installing the codecs through the Software app. Should I delete them and then install through the terminal?
Btw here are the codecs I have installed through the Software app:
You have openh264 installed already which should cover your bases. Since it quite clearly isn't I'm not sure what to suggest. What file manager is this that's having issues?
Ext4
Ext4 is a filesystem. That is the part of the kernel that actually stores and retrieves the files on disk. What program are you using to browse files? It's a bit hard to tell from this screenshot what program it's a screenshot of, but it looks like Nautilus (the default file browser in GNOME). Is that it?
lol, no :)
first of all, it only searches for occurrences in already installed packages and is more or less a
grep -l xxx /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list. So you can't use it in order to determine which package to install, for that you use https://packages.debian.org or apt-file instead.Secondly, what you search for isn't relative to anything (wtf):
Look for preview size in the settings for your file manager and increase it.