Thumbnailing FLV and other video files with Helm

While there’s no built-in support for thumbnails from video such as FLV and MOV files, it’s easy to get them displayed in Helm. Here’s how:

Helm has built-in support for generating image thumbnails of many common image files, such as JPEG, PNG, TGA and so forth. These are used in Image and File Browsers, Thumbnail components (which show the image on a particular device keyer) and Image components (which can be loaded from any file).

If Helm doesn’t know how to make the thumbnail itself, it asks Windows to make one. And Windows, in turn, can use plug-in codecs to generate these. So by installing a suitable codec pack you can get video thumbnails in Helm.

We recommend the K-Lite codec pack, which includes the Icaros thumbnail generator.

It’s available for download from this page.

Frequently asked questions about K-Lite thumbnails can be found here.