Hi,
I’ve almost completed my “perfect” desktop based on Rocky Linux 8 and KDE, and I’m currently busy sanding down a few rough edges.
One nagging bug that I haven’t been able to solve are missing video thumbnails in the Dolphin file manager.
Normally when you install the ffmpegthumbs package, Dolphin allows to display thumbnails for video files. If this doesn’t work out of the box, then the configuration section allows to enable/disable video thumbnails. This works with every KDE-based distribution under the sun: OpenSUSE, Debian, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, etc.
Unfortunately EPEL’s implementation of KDE for RHEL8/Rocky Linux 8 is buggy in that aspect. Video thumbnails are not displayed, even when the ffmpegthumbs package is installed. And the corresponding configuration option in Dolphin is downright missing.
While this is not exactly a showstopper bug, it’s quite nagging. Most of my users will complain about it, and it’s also quite a nuisance as far as I’m concerned. I edit quite a lot of climbing videos with lots of video snippets, and without the thumbnails I can’t tell which file is which.
I’ve filed a corresponding bug report a few weeks ago on Red Hat’s EPEL bugzilla, but the maintainer doesn’t seem motivated to do something about it.
Now I know how to rebuild packages using SRPMS and Mock, but I’m puzzled. I can’t seem to find the option in any of the packages. I tried to rebuild dolphin and kdegraphics-thumbnailers, but to no avail. My objective was to rebuild the corresponding package and put the “enhanced” version in my personal RPM repository.
Maybe one of the gurus here is more competent in activating the missing feature ? At this point I’m clueless, so I’d be very grateful for some pointers.
Cheers,
Niki
I’ll answer that myself, since I just managed to solve the problem, after a few hours of searching and pulling my hair out.
Turns out that there are two concurring thumbnail tools named ffmpegthumbnailer and ffmpegthumbs. The first one is available in EPEL, and it’s not the one needed by Dolphin. The second one is nowhere to be found in any third party repository, so I built it myself:
https://www.microlinux.fr/pub/rockylinux/8/x86_64/packages/
Now video thumbnails work like a charm with Dolphin under Rocky Linux 8.
Cheers,
Niki
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It looks like the ffmpegthumbs package is supplied by the RPM Fusion repo…or at least it is supposed to be? It looks like numerous Fedora-flavored packages are listed in the RPM Fusion Free repo; see repo package page at free/ffmpegthumbs | PkgDB. It looks like there are also supposed to be EL7, EL8, and EL9 packages available (maintained by user sergiomb) but I can’t seem to find any ELx packages in the repo. Maybe I’m not interpreting this repo page correctly? Or did they just check all the ELx boxes but not actually create the package? Is there a way to request that the RPM Fusion guys build the ELx packages? In my case, I’m hoping for the EL9 package 
Well I couldn’t figure out why it’s listed in the RPM Fusion repo database but the package doesn’t actually seem to exist, so I submitted a bug report. Maybe that will help
Update: unfortunately the bug report did not help, as they immediately closed it as “invalid.” I guess there are currently no EL packages bulit in RPM Fusion for ffmpegthumbs, even though they are listed in their Package Database system. I have asked how to request that someone build the packages if possible (since their Package Database does list EL packages as possible, or at least assigned to someone? I’m not quite sure). Otherwise, I guess we just need to compile it ourselves…
https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6520