Clarified summary.

There's interest in this again due to T92457 -- PageImages sometimes selects a video that's listed prominently, and it'd be easy for everyone if the default thumbnail could be set nicely.

Note this needs to work across foreign repos for Commons and such.

A parser function that sets a page prop with the target time should be fairly easy to create on the backend, with prettier UX for setting it via GUI something to consider as an alternative or future addition.

Cross-site considerations, however:

• if just in the page prop, it won't be visible to a Handler on a foreign wiki (eg, enwiki vs file+file page on commons).
• -> so could instead save into the file's metadata, which gets exported via both local foreign repos (WMF sites) and API repos (InstantCommons)
• Probably should save into page props *and* reflect into the metadata? Or is that redundant...

Handler transforms then only need to pull the default time from the metadata, which they already receive...

Thumbs using the default -- in place of the -seek=60- or whatever in their filenames, however, will go to thumbor in production instead of to MediaWiki, and will not see the default. I think this is not a problem however -- we only need to apply the default at transform generation time, so we'll be producing a distinct URL with the exact time.

Another consideration is cache invalidation -- when changing the metadata we must invalidate cache usages of the file as well as the page.

Who maintains this extension or knows enough about how it works to help set this up?

For TimedMediaHandler that'd be me -- I'll do a spike on this tomorrow. :)

Got sidetracked on a research project; continuing. :)

Blocked by T195580

Unblocked, got a patch for that. :D Will poke further along today.

Is there a patch I can help review?

Change 436434 had a related patch set uploaded (by Brion VIBBER; owner: Brion VIBBER):
[mediawiki/extensions/TimedMediaHandler@master] DO NOT MERGE - WIP - Thumbtime parser function for TMH

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/436434

@Jdlrobson I just uploaded my current version of it. I've got the parser function & page prop working, but trying to shove it into the extended file metadata may be a mistake. Currently it fails in concert with CommonsMetadata extension. I'll see if there's a saner way to do this tomorrow. :D Feel free to take a peek! https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/436434

@brion just to note this is on my radar but annual reviews are taking up all my time right now :)

What's the state of the associated patch @brion ?

At [[commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Why Can't You Download Videos on YouTube How a 20-Year-Old Law Stops youtube-dl Users AND Farmers.webm‎]], we have a case where the auto-selected image is a nonfree frame. It's likely de minimis within the video, but it's not appropriate as the default thumb. And if we blur/blank it out for stricter license compliance, then we have blurred or blank image as the default thumb.

Change 436434 abandoned by TheDJ:

[mediawiki/extensions/TimedMediaHandler@master] Thumbtime parser function for TMH

Reason:

3 years old

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/436434

Change 436434 restored by TheDJ:

[mediawiki/extensions/TimedMediaHandler@master] Thumbtime parser function for TMH

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/436434

whoops, sorry Brion, got mixed in with other stuff that I was abandoning.

We at WMDE have a cooperation where this topic comes up regularly.
We would really aprreciate if the thumbnail could be chosen or added by the uploader.
We have a whole series of high-quality videos donated / provided under CC BY and we want to make them shine

What is the state of the patch? It seemed ready in 2018, what is blocking it? The approach seems right to me. I agree that it is urgently needed!

I rebased it, wasn't able to test it yet.

Perhaps this should go as a new feature, but if it's not too late to get it right from the start, this thumbnail should also be used on search result pages.